Evergreen, Katie Paterson
Galleri F15, Moss, Norway, 28 May – 5 October 2022


Galleri F 15 is pleased to present Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s exhibition Evergreen, her first solo show in Norway. In this major exhibition, Katie Paterson (1981) brings together over twenty works, from 2007 to the present, that transcend time, nature, landscape, human life, and the cosmos. The title of the exhibition, which is also the title of a new artwork, refers to plants that retain green leaves all year round, bringing to mind vitality and optimism – but also grief at the thought that everything is, or could soon be, lost. 

Five works are premiered at Galleri F 15: sheer curtains dyed the colour of the first stars in the Universe are hung on every window of Galleri F 15’s first floor; Evergreen (2022), an embroidery depicting flowers that are now extinct, in the style of the Arts and Crafts movement; The Moment (2022), an hourglass containing dust predating the Earth and the Sun; –There lays the Days between- (2022), a ticker clock recording every Earthly sunrise since the beginning of our planet’s history; and Endling (2021), a painting realised using one hundred pigments made from materials ranging from five-billion-year-old pre-solar dust to the ginkgo trees of Hibakujumoku that have survived the Hiroshima bombings. Keys to understand Endling and –There lays the Days between- will be included as diagrams in a new publication by Katie Paterson, along with diagrams of three earlier works: Cosmic Spectrum (2019), To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), and Fossil Necklace (2013). 

The exhibition at Galleri F 15 speaks of the great challenges of our time, yet it is also celebratory and mystical. Evergreen allows us to travel through deep time and feel the interconnectedness of nature, the planet, other atmospheres, and geological times. 

In Norway, many know Katie Paterson through her public art project Future Library (2014–2114). As part of this hundred-year project, a forest of trees is growing just outside Oslo. One writer every year, for one hundred years, contributes a text to a collection that will be printed in an anthology of books made from the paper produced by the forest in 2114. Each text will be sealed in a glass drawer in the new Silent Room in Deichman Bjørvika, which will open to the public on June 12 2022. Exhibition visitors will have the opportunity to view a documentary on Future Library, and see and one of the limited edition Future Library certificates.

www.gallerif15.no