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The Museum of the World, by Emanuele Coccia

“…From this perspective Future Library is the perfect answer to what we have called the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene has often been described as the movement by which we have invaded all space, made the entire planet our home, expanded to the point where we directly or indirectly occupy so much of the world and so much of the Earth that there is no space left. But the opposite could also be said: the planet has invaded our homes to such an extent that in our living rooms, bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms live not only partners, children, and perhaps a dog, cat or forsythia, but every other living species. All species, even those least like us, have become pets, houseplants, bacteria, or companion fungi. We are called to share a one-bedroom apartment with them and learn to love them as we love dogs and cats. We cannot move; there is nowhere else to go. Other species cannot leave their homes either. This library is the museum of the dream, and of all species, and the beginning of a city that is home to all of them. It is their and our collective daydream.” Read Future Library 2024 essay by Emanuele Coccia.

Wallpaper Magazine: New glass sculpture creates a verdant wonderland at Apple’s Cupertino HQ

‘Mirage’ at Apple Park is the work of Zeller & Moye and artist Katie Paterson, a shimmering array of glass columns that snakes through the grounds of the company’s monumental HQ. Read more.

The Future Library: An untold anthology growing in Oslo, Vogue Scandinavia, by Billie Breskin, 2024

The 100-year durational artwork celebrates a decade this year. This weekend, in Oslo’s Nordmarka wilderness, something of a pilgrimage will take place. Amongst the lush woodlands that surround the Norwegian capital, a special glade of one thousand trees, the Future Library Forest, will reach the 10th year of its growth. A decade ago, the trees of this forest were planted and, 90 years from now, they will be cut down. For each year of this century span, an author writes a manuscript. Kept safe in a chamber within Deichman Bjørvika, Oslo’s main library, nobody will read the texts until 2114, when they will be printed on paper made from the trees of the Future Library Forest. Read more.

Apollo: ‘An elegy to a disappearing planet’, review of Requiem at Ingleby Gallery

Cradled in my palm is a round, glass vial containing about a tablespoon of crushed bryozoans – tiny, primitive ocean-dwellers, whose species has lived on earth for about half a billion years. Since the start of the Devonian Period, the specimens I am holding have remained in much the same shape – forged together in a colony, not unlike a coral reef, on a stratum of rock in southwestern Ukraine – gradually becoming fossils. Until a relative blink-of-the-eye ago, that is, when they were collected, crushed into a fine dust, poured into this vial, and at last picked up by me. I attempt, vainly, to muster a couple of words equal to the occasion of the strange ceremony that is about to occur; then I walk over to the middle of the room and tip the bryozoa dust into a large glass urn, where it lands with a bathetic little puff, to mingle with the dust of other aeons.

Katie Paterson in Kinfolk, Issue 40

Katie Paterson’s garage contains moon dust. It’s stored alongside offcuts from a mammoth’s thighbone and a collection of wood samples from 10, 000 different trees, each acquired in the name of art. In her work, Paterson poses searching existential questions in the form of poetic acts, whether that be setting up a live phone line to a melting glacier, sending a meteorite back into space or bouncing a recording of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata off the surface of the moon…

Julian Charrière And Katie Paterson: Meteors And Metabolisms, by Nicolas Bourriaud
“Katie Paterson and Julian Charrière are currently exhibiting in parallel. In both of their oeuvres, human existence itself is not shown, but is instead resituated in its cosmic or geological position, represented in the general context of the biomass. And both, in their respective works, implement temporalities of great amplitude. Their works could thus belong to a neo-metaphysical movement in contemporary art, which will undoubtedly remain associated with the beginning of the twenty-first century in future accounts of the history of art. Because the essential question for the artists of our time is the meaning of their work in a world in danger.”

On the aromas of the first and last forests, by David Haskell

“Humans have used incense for thousands of years, mostly as a bridge to what dwells beyond the everyday, through prayer, oblation, and ritual. To Burn, Forest, Fire places that experience into the context of deep time and the living Earth community.”

Contemporary artists pay homage to land art legend Nancy Holt, Wallpaper Magazine, 2022

At the 12th-century Lismore Castle, Ireland, a group show ‘Light and Language’ explores the enduring legacy of American conceptual and land art pioneer Nancy Holt. Scottish artist Katie Paterson has created a new work responding to the architecture of Lismore Castle. Her ‘Ideas’ wall pieces are subtle: short texts that ‘when read come alive through the visitor’s imaginations’. Discrete in scale, they are cut from silver and reflect brightly when the light hits them. The artist reflects on her affinity with Holt’s artistic sensibilities: ‘her work showed me how expansive art can be; through its material form (she worked across mediums) it’s scale, its conceptual language and emotional and perceptual impact. Nancy Holt worked with the cyclical time of the universe, the motions of the earth and the sun. She aimed to ‘connect people with the planet earth’, to bring ‘the sky down to earth’ which chimes very much with my approach.’ 

Message to the Moon: Katie Paterson’s Life in Astronomy, Frieze, profile, Issue 204

Contemplating deep space and ‘cosmic archaeology’, the artist reflects on her fascination with the universe beyond planet Earth.

“I was sitting in a cupboard in Reykjavik when I learned that it was possible to send messages to the moon. I was scrolling through pages of lunar information and came across the technology ‘Earth-Moon-Earth’, which allows messages to be sent to the moon and back, fragmented by space and distance. Later, walking under a full moon, I imagined what messages I might transmit there myself….” Katie Paterson

Interview, Paterson, Artist of deep time, Nature Magazine

Philip Ball talks to Katie Paterson, whose artworks take on climate change, Moon dust and the death of stars.

Art review: NOW, The Scotsman

The focus of this final NOW moment is Glasgow-born Katie Paterson, with the first major presentation of her work in Scotland. Like the celestial bodies she concerns herself with, Paterson’s work evolves slowly, and this show brings together projects from the last decade. Embracing ideas of cosmic scale and significance, she has developed quietly ingenious ways of fitting them inside our heads. Applying both rigorous research and rigorous conceptualism, she takes material which often appears closed and distant and cracks it open, finding not existential angst but a kind of wonder and poetry.

Katie Paterson, Sculpture Magazine

Scottish artist Katie Paterson has described time as the “material” with which she creates her work. In this modest but significant survey her playful, rigorously researched works tick with the passing of millennia as stars die, solar eclipses pass, and planets spin. Shown across six rooms, the show brings together 11 works from 2007 to the present and marks—with separate contributions from Darren Almond, Shona Macnaughton, and Lucy Raven—the final exhibition in the gallery’s contemporary art series “NOW.”

How to future-proof a work of art that will not be completed for 100 years, The Art Newspaper

As Katie Paterson’s sand castle project goes on tour, we look at how her Future Library is being made to outlive the artist.

‘I’ve breathed in some crazy things from outer space’ – Katie Paterson’s cosmic art, The Guardian

The artist who once sent a meteorite back into orbit is now looking for the heavenly in Turner’s paintings, in a show that explodes with moonlight and gamma ray confetti.

Katie Paterson feature in Harper’s Bazar, Quantum Leap

Katie Paterson’s visionary exploration of time, space and the beauty of the cosmos.

First There is a Mountain, Anthology

“Lift a handful of sand, let it slip between your fingers and contemplate the eons that have passed, the civilisations that have risen and crumbled away before time milled it to this fineness. It drifts and obscures, burying crops, grazing land, cities and entire civilisations; yet sometimes it shifts to reveal what has been lost.” James Attlee

“Someone once tried to explain the concept of infinity to me by saying that if an eagle flew past a mountain every million years and touched it lightly with its wingtip, by the time the mountain had crumbled to nothing, that might equate to one second of forever.” Helen Pheby

“An expanse of sand is the most eternal of landscapes and the most changeable. As we build our mountains, we remember that our labours are ephemeral, our lives are short and everything must change.” Patrick Barkham

“Sand is mesmerising: both ordinary and enchanted, intimate and infinite, a  marker of time – the three-minute egg: the five-minute essay – as well as of infinities of scale…” Richard Hamblyn

“How small, how fragile can a work of art be before it drifts away on the wind or floats out to sea? And how large, or long-drawn-out, before we are unable to apprehend it all at once?” Brian Dillon