Katie Paterson was born in 1981 in Glasgow. She received her BA from Edinburgh College of Art in 2004, and in 2007 completed the MFA program at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. At Slade, Paterson’s interest in ecological issues manifested in the work she created for the school’s degree show. For this exhibition, Paterson presented Vatnajökull (the sound of), which allowed visitors—and anyone else in the world—to call, by telephone, a submerged microphone that transmitted live sound from the Jökulsárlón lagoon in Iceland. While listening to the underwater sounds produced by the melting Vatnajökull (Vatna Glacier), callers were directly connected to a politically charged but geographically distant natural event. Paterson has since focused on harnessing the interpretive potential of various technologies, engaging the expertise of scientists in a variety of fields. Through her multidisciplinary practice, she manages to bring the vast scale and temporal dimensions of geological and cosmological events into sharp focus. The artist’s 2014 work Timepieces (Solar System) consists of nine clocks affixed to a wall. Devoid of numerical markings, each timepiece tells the time of one of our solar system’s eight planets, as well as Earth’s moon. As the duration of a day varies according to each planet’s position in relation to the sun, Paterson’s clocks allow viewers to consider how the passage of time varies in different locations in the solar system. Paterson has also initiated projects of varying durations that will continue to develop throughout her lifetime—and inevitably beyond it. For one such project, Future Library, Paterson planted a forest in Norway. Over the course of the next hundred years—the project’s terminus is 2114—a trust will tend to the forest, and each year one artist will be invited to contribute a text. In 2114, when the Norwegian forest is fully grown and 100 manuscripts have been submitted, the unread compendium will be printed on paper supplied by the forest. Paterson has had solo exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford (2008); the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2012); BAWAG P.S.K. Contemporary, Vienna (2012); Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry (2013); Fundação Leal Rios, Lisbon (2013); Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge (2013); and Kunstverein & Stiftung Springhornhof, Neuenkirchen, Germany (2014). Her artwork 100 Billion Suns was exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2011), and the artist participated in the Whitstable Biennial, East Kent (2010), as well as the Guangzhou Triennial, China (2012). Paterson lives and works in Berlin.