Former Somerset House Studios resident

Katie Paterson

Visual artist creating multimedia artworks concerning translation, distance and scale.

Somerset House Studios

New Wing

Katie Paterson, Somerset House Studios Resident

Katie Paterson is known for conceptual artworks that have involved broadcasting the sounds of a melting glacier live to a visitor on a mobile phone in an art gallery, mapping all the dead stars in the universe, compiling a slide archive of the history of darkness across the ages, custom-making a light bulb to simulate the experience of moonlight, burying a nano-sized grain of sand deep within the Sahara desert, and sending a re-cast meteorite back into space.

Katie Paterson, Hollow, Somerset House Studios

Katie Paterson, Light bulb to Simulate Moonlight

“Katie Paterson operates like an Enlightenment polymath, drawing on both scientific expertise and Romantic wonderment to create art that crosses mediums and disciplines. Rather than rejecting categories, she includes them all.”

Zoe Pilger, The Independent

Katie has exhibited internationally, and her works have been included in major exhibitions such as Tate Britain, Hayward Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Guggenheim Museum, New York and The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. She was winner of the Independent’s Creative 30 award ‘for Britain’s most creative young person’ and most recently the winner of the Visual Arts category of the 2014 South Bank Awards. Her Future Library work in Norway sees a forest growing to supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in one hundred years time, with commissioned authors including Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell.

Future Library, 2014

Since becoming a resident, Katie has created the major new work Totality, which was commission by the Arts Council Collection and presented at Somerset House. Katie’s studio is a key development space for her collaboration with specialists in different technologies, including astronomers, electrical engineers and amateur radio enthusiasts known as 'moon-bouncers'.

Katie Paterson, Totality

Katie Paterson, Fossil Necklace, Somerset House Studios

Somerset House Shop