Katie Paterson brings her work to Kettle's Yard

Associated media

Kettle’s Yard Gallery & St Peter’s Church, Cambridge

26 April – 23 June 2013

‘Katie Paterson’s art enables us to engage with forces that are too intangible and too immense for us to experience in other ways’ Art Monthly
  
An exhibition of work by artist Katie Paterson (b. Glasgow 1981) opens at Kettle’s Yard tomorrow, 26 April. Paterson has earned widespread acclaim since leaving the Slade School of Fine Art in 2007 and was recently the youngest artist to be included in the ‘Light Show’ exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London.

Collaborating with leading scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s remarkable poetic and conceptual projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. The exhibition at Kettle’s Yard and St Peter’s Church is the culmination of the artist’s residency at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge. This is part of the Wellcome Collection’s Art in Global Health project.
  
The exhibition brings together a major new piece Fossil Necklace and several recent artworks.

Andrew Nairne, Director of Kettle’s Yard comments:

We are thrilled to be presenting Katie Paterson's Fossil Necklacein St. Peter's Church, Cambridge next to Kettle's Yard. This will be the first opportunity to see this major new piece by one of our most talented younger artists. Her highly original and imaginative work poetically exposes our sense of self within time, space and history'
  
Fossil Necklace is made of over 170 specially carved beads. Each fossil bead represents a moment in time and threaded together they chart the evolution of life on earth. The oldest fossil is over 3.5 billion years old. The necklace is:

a history of our planet and life, the vast expanses of time embodied in the tiny beads, and our pathways across the planet rooted in the rocks, looking from the present back to the very earliest forms of cellular life.(Katie Paterson, April 2013).

The artwork evolved during Paterson’s residency at the Sanger Institute where she worked with scientists who are using DNA sequencing to unlock the evolutionary origins of life on Earth.

Fossil Necklace will be displayed in St Peter’s Church next to Kettle’s Yard. St Peter’s, a beautiful small church, was rebuilt in the 18th century but retains 12th century and Roman details. It is now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.

Other pieces in the exhibition, displayed in Kettle’s Yard Gallery approach the themes of time and scale in different ways. To create her work Inside this desert lies the tiniest grain of sand Paterson collaborated with experts in nanotechnology to carve a grain of sand to just 0.00005mm across, which she then buried deep within the Sahara Desert. A photograph of Paterson standing amongst the dunes scattering the tiny grain features in the exhibition, a contemplation of the monumental elevating the minute.

As The World Turns is a record player moving imperceptibly slowly, in time with the rotation of the Earth. In Campo del Cielo, Field of Sky an ancient meteorite, fallen to earth and buried, is discovered and remade. The meteorite has been cast, melted, then re-cast by the artist into a new version of itself that visitors can touch. The artist hopes to return it to space one day.  

Opening event: Thursday 25 April, 6.30–8.30p.m.  Introduction by Kettle’s Yard Director Andrew Nairne and Katie Paterson at 7p.m.
  
Katie Paterson’s residency at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is one of six international residencies which make up Wellcome Collection’s Art in Global Health project.
  
Kettle’s Yard is grateful to the Churches Conservation Trust and St Giles’ Church for their support.