Katie Paterson – Evergreen

The Scottish artist Katie Paterson (1981) presents her first solo exhibition in Norway at Galleri F 15. In this major exhibition, Katie Paterson 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, suggesting 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: The work Evergreen (2022) is a study of nature in time and space, depicting flowers that no longer exist in the style of the Arts and Crafts movement, especially homages May Morris´(1862-1938) iconic embroidery Owl from 1905-1906. In Evergreen the extinct plants are given eternal life, beautifully hand-embroidered in to a work of art; for First Light (2022)  sheer curtains are dyed in the colour of the first stars in the Universe; The Moment (2022), is an hourglass containing dust predating the Earth and the Sun; –There lays the Days between- (2022) is a ticker board recording every Earthly sunrise since the beginning of our planet’s history; and Endling (2021) is 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.

Deep time. Katie Paterson´s great fascination with nature, the universe, and ‘deep time’, – the stretch of geologic history over billions of years, runs through the exhibition in poetic and visual works remining us of our place on earth, connecting us to the past and suggesting for us the dark consequences of man-made destruction of nature. In the exhibition we are bathed in light resembling moonlight, we breathe in the scent of the first and the last forest on earth, we sense the colours of the universe from the first star’s pale blue hue to the dark reddish brown colour of the last light, we experience all dead stars registered by man since the beginning of time, hear the sound of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata sent in Morse code from Earth, reflected off the surface of the Moon, and then received back on Earth.

A lifelong series of ideas. Central to katie Paterson´s art is an ever-evolving series of ‘Ideas’. All her works begins as an idea that may or may not come into being. Throughout the exhibition 26 Ideas (2014-) in stainless steel hang on walls, as short haiku-like sentences that take shape in the imagination of whoever reads the words and so become an expression of the idea itself.

Future Library. 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 now 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 from the trees growing 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. Writers to date include Margaret Atwood (2014), David Mitchell (2015), Sjón 2016), Elif Shafak (2017, Han Kang (2018), Karl Ove Knausgård (2019), Ocean Vuong (2020) og Tsitsi Dangarembga (2021).

Exhibition visitors will have the opportunity to view the documentary film on Future Library and the Future Library certificate printed on paper made from the trees from the Norwegian forest. The Certificate entitle the owner to one full edition of the anthology in 100 years time.

Publication. 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).

Katie Paterson, born in Glasgow 1981, is regarded as one of the leading artists of her generation working at the nexus of art and science. Collaborating with leading scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson´s poetic and conceptual projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise in order to create intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements between people and the natural environment.

Thanks to the British Council, British Embassy Oslo, the Future Library Trust, Ingleby Gallery, Moss Municipality and Viken County Council. Curator Maria C. Havstam, Head of the Art Department, Galleri F 15.

This exhibition in Norway coincides with a major institutional presentation of works by Katie Paterson in Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, in spring 2022, the Future Library handover in Oslo, Norway,12 June, and the inauguration of Mirage at Apple Campus in Cupertino, USA, in spring 2022.