Katie Paterson Announced as Artica Svalbard Resident for 2025
Artica Svalbard is delighted to announce that Katie Paterson will be joining us for a residency in June 2025.
Katie Paterson (born 1981, Scotland) is widely regarded as one of the leading artists of her generation. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic, and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment. Combining a Romantic sensibility with a research-based approach, conceptual rigour, and minimalist presentation, her work collapses the distance between the viewer and the most distant edges of time and the cosmos.
Paterson has broadcast the sounds of a melting glacier live, mapped all the dead stars, compiled a slide archive of darkness from the depths of the Universe, created a light bulb to simulate the experience of moonlight, and sent a recast meteorite back into space. Eliciting feelings of humility, wonder, and melancholy akin to the experience of the Romantic sublime, her work is both understated in gesture and monumental in scope. One of her most celebrated projects, Future Library (2014–2114), is a century-long artwork that invites authors to contribute books that will remain unread until the year 2114, when they will finally be printed using paper from a forest she planted in Nordmarka, near Oslo, Norway.
Katie Paterson has exhibited internationally, from London to New York, Berlin to Seoul, with her works included in major exhibitions at Turner Contemporary, Hayward Gallery, Tate Britain, Kunsthalle Wien, MCA Sydney, Guggenheim Museum, and The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. She was the winner of the Visual Arts category of the South Bank Awards and is an Honorary Fellow of Edinburgh University. She is represented by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, and James Cohan Gallery, New York.
During her residency at Artica Svalbard, Paterson will undertake a project titled ‘True North’, which will use satellite imagery and Arctic light to create a unique photographic series. The work will feature images captured over the polar north—spanning Ellesmere Island, Greenland, and Svalbard—using the camera on the nano-satellite "EYE", operated by Sony's STAR SPHERE space inspiration project. Paterson’s project will explore the relationship between Arctic light, time, and landscape change, using a unique photographic process. Reflecting on the project, Paterson notes:
"The Arctic light holds the memory of a changing world—what we capture today may soon belong to the past. These images will preserve traces of landscapes in flux, where ice, light, and time unravel. True North is both a witness and a memory, documenting a world that is vanishing before our eyes. These photographs may outlast the glaciers themselves, becoming relics of icy landscapes whose fading light could disappear within a century.”
Stay tuned for updates on her project and its development.
Katie Paterson, © Bjørvika Utvikling by Kristin von Hirsch, 2017