Katie Paterson: Field of the Sky

About

Field of the Sky is the first solo exhibition in France by British artist Katie Paterson. She assembles most of the work she has produced since 2007, among which As the World Turns, acquired by the Frac Franche-Comté in 2013, in addition to a work specially created for the exhibit.

The exhibition is an occasion to discover the protean work of this young Scottish artist who reroutes scientific knowledge for dream-like ends and poetic purposes. Her pieces invite us to explore matter and life, time and the cosmos.

Katie Paterson divulged sounds emanating from the melting of an Icelandic glacier, mapped out 27,000 dead stars, bounced Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in Morse code off the moon’s surface and translated recovered data into a new music diffused via mechanical piano, produced an electric light bulb duplicating moonlight, or invented a necklace from 170 fossils, each representing a major event in life’s evolution… The piece acquired by the Frac FrancheComté and the artist’s very latest production both provide an excellent idea about the extrapolations and divagations found within the whole of her work and their perceptible resolutions.

As the World Turns consists of a vinyl disk upon which Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is engraved. Placed on a record player whose rotation speed correlates to that of the Earth on its axis (one revolution in twenty-four hours), its movement, like its melody are as imperceptible as our planet’s movement. 

Produced for the exhibition at the Frac Franche-Comté, Candle (from Earth into a Black Hole) was designed after an analysis of our universe’s molecules. This work shines like a candle composed of different strata whose perfume corresponds to the odor of each star, planet and space making up our system: a smell of gunpowder for the moon, geranium for the stratosphere, raspberry and rum for space and sulfuric acid for Venus… From earth’s orangey smell to odorless empty space and black holes, Katie Paterson invites us on an olfactory voyage to the ends of the earth. If Katie Paterson’s works are the fruit of a dialog with scientists and researchers in the domains of geology, astronomy, ecology and more recently genetics, she takes them at their word or literally, pushing their theories or discoveries even further…on the side of dreams.