Oxford's oldest student newspaper

Independent since 1920

Encounters: Katie Paterson

If all you could remember of Katie Paterson’s latest exhibition was a muted, monochromatic dream, that’s because it was one. 26-year-old Glaswegian artist Katie Peterson has been working in a series of projects since 2005 which are now on display. Paterson was inspired by a fevered vision, in which she traces the history of her drinking water back to a remote glacier, and metamorphoses into that glacier. Paterson is interested in merging the themes of subjectivity and landscape, as well as the collapsing of the physical and conceptual space.

The two installations on display rely on sound, rather than sight. I am not really sure that this qualifies as art, but its certainly interesting. At the centre of the exhibition is Earth-Moon-Earth: a black piano haltingly plays the Moonlight Sonata while a pair of headphones transmits endless sequences of Morse code. This may not seem like art at first, but the title Earth-Moon-Earth hints at an interesting concept: Paterson used the moon as a satellite, encoded the sonata, bounced it off the moon and then returned it to music here on earth. In the process, random notes of the sonata were lost to the uneven lunar surface, so the result is an odd distortion. The fascination with the imaginative possibilities of sounds is evident in Vatnajökull (the sound of), for which only a white-on-white neon sign ‘07757001122’ is on display. Visitors are invited to dial this number and gain access to the melancholic gurgling of the Vatnajökull glacier — Europe’s largest in volume, now discreetly yet rapidly melting while we listen from a distance. 

 

There is a contrast between the deceptive stillness in Paterson’s minimalist art, and the unseen turbulence of the landscapes which she portrays. The installations on show are only the tip of the iceberg; they deliberately only give the viewer a minute glimpse of the vastitude beneath. Hers is a world in which time is measured on the double-scale of the eternal and the ephemeral. Caught in nature’s wonder, we are synchronised with the immense clockwork that times the flux of glaciers and the tides of the ocean, not released from the orbit until we leave the room — and perhaps not even then.

Check out our other content

Most Popular Articles