Katie Paterson: Afterlife and the Art of Deep Time
Katie Paterson is a new artist held in the Colstoun Arts Collection in 2026, currently we only hold one small work by her but we already count it as a privilege to have her work in our care. So it is with particular pleasure that we draw attention to a significant moment in the Scottish art calendar this summer: Afterlife, Paterson's ambitious new work, comes to Collective in Edinburgh from 19 June to 6 September 2026. For audiences in Scotland, it is the first chance to encounter a piece that has already been described as one of the most affecting commissions of recent years.
An artist of the cosmos and the everyday
Born in Glasgow in 1981, Katie Paterson studied at Edinburgh College of Art before completing an MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She lives and works in Scotland, and is represented by Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh — a relationship that has anchored some of her most resonant exhibitions to the city over the past two decades. Today she is widely regarded as one of the foremost artists of her generation, an estimation borne out by the breadth of institutions that hold her work and the seriousness with which her ideas are received.
Paterson's practice is conceptual and research-led, frequently developed in collaboration with scientists, astronomers, geologists and engineers. Yet it would be a mistake to read it as cool or clinical. Her projects stage intimate, often startlingly tender encounters between human beings and the vastness of geological and cosmic time. She has spoken of her work as an attempt to merge the microcosm with the macrocosm — to hold the immensity of the universe and the smallness of a single human life within the same frame of attention. The result is an art that pairs a Romantic sensibility with a measured, almost minimalist mode of presentation: ideas of enormous scale delivered with great economy.
That combination has produced some of the most quietly extraordinary works of recent contemporary art. Earth–Moon–Earth translated Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata into Morse code, transmitted it to the Moon, and played back the version that returned — altered by the Moon's surface, with notes lost in its craters. For Vatnajökull (the sound of), she connected a telephone line to a melting Icelandic glacier, so that callers could listen, in real time, to ice disappearing. Fossil Necklace strung beads carved from fossils spanning the entire history of life on Earth. In each case the gesture is simple and the implication is immense.
A lecture given by Katie Paterson for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where Paterson talks about a number of the significant works realised throughout her career
Landscape and nature, on a planetary scale
Paterson sits naturally within our theme of landscape and nature, though hers is a landscape redrawn at the scale of deep time. She engages the natural world both as a physical entity and as an idea, expanding our ordinary sense of place until it encompasses glaciers, deserts, forests and the night sky. This is not the pastoral tradition of the picturesque view; it is landscape understood as geology, ecology and atmosphere — as the living, eroding, warming systems we are part of and are altering.
Her materials make the point plainly. She has worked with sand gathered from deserts across the planet, with dust dating from before the formation of the solar system, with the light of dying stars and the silence of the deep sea. Mirage, her permanent public sculpture for Apple Park in California, made with the Berlin and Mexico City studio Zeller & Moye, distils desert sands from around the world into iridescent glass. Requiem, shown at Ingleby in Edinburgh in 2022, told the story of the planet's birth and life in a single vessel of dust, from pre-solar material to the present day.
Perhaps her best-known work, Future Library, is also her most patient meditation on landscape and time. Begun in 2014 and reaching completion only in 2114, it began with a forest planted outside Oslo. Each year one writer contributes a text that will remain unread until the trees are felled, a century on, to print the collected anthology. Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Ocean Vuong are among those who have written into a future none of them will see. It is a work of forestry as much as literature — an act of faith in the persistence of both woodland and readers.
Set against this body of work, Afterlife feels like a culmination. It gathers nearly two hundred ancient amulets — small talismanic objects, carved over millennia by Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Viking, Islamic, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Celtic, Greco-Roman and Pre-Columbian cultures — and recreates them, working with museums around the world. But Paterson remakes these protective objects in materials drawn from endangered landscapes and fragile ecosystems: rock exposed by retreating glaciers, coral from the Great Barrier Reef, stone from islands threatened by rising seas. Each carries the story of a place under pressure, and together they form a memorial to species and habitats at risk of vanishing. The amulets are arranged into thematic groupings that read almost as an atlas of our environmental moment — biosphere and hydrosphere, ice and wildfire, extraction, mining and pollution — so that the installation maps the pressures of the present even as it draws on the rituals of the past. At Collective the amulets rest on a circular sycamore table, crafted by local makers and designed with Zeller & Moye to echo the room that holds them. The result is both a tribute and a call to attention — ritual reimagined for the age of climate change.
A career of remarkable reach
If the works are intimate, their reach has been anything but. Paterson's art is held in major public collections internationally, among them the Guggenheim and the Whitney in New York, MIT and Princeton University Library in the United States, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, the Arts Council Collection, and — close to home — the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. She has held solo exhibitions at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Turner Contemporary in Margate, James Cohan in New York, and museums and art spaces across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Her honours and collaborations are similarly wide-ranging. She has won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Visual Art, held an honorary fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, undertaken a Leverhulme residency in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London, and served as an artist advisor to NASA. Her 2022 TED Talk on what she calls the art of deep time has introduced her thinking to audiences far beyond the gallery. Across 2026 her work travels widely, with projects and exhibitions spanning Europe, Asia and the United States — yet it is in Edinburgh, the city where she trained and is represented, that this particular homecoming takes place.
That homecoming is itself a Scottish story. Afterlife was commissioned by Creative Folkestone for the Folkestone Triennial 2025, where it was installed in a Martello tower on the Kent coast until the Triennial closed on 19 October 2025. The Triennial was curated by Sorcha Carey, Director of Collective, and it is through that connection that the work now travels north. Presented in the City Dome Gallery on Calton Hill — one of Edinburgh's most singular settings, with the skyline of the city laid out below — Afterlife will be seen in Scotland for the first time. Its run extends through August, overlapping with the Edinburgh Art Festival, when the city is at its most alive to contemporary art.
We have no involvement in the exhibition ourselves; we are simply admirers of Katie Paterson's work, of Ingleby Gallery, and of the programme Collective continues to build on Calton Hill. We would warmly encourage anyone with an interest in contemporary art, ecology or the long view of time to make the visit. Afterlife is on at Collective, Edinburgh, from 19 June to 6 September 2026, Wednesday to Sunday, 10am–5pm, with free admission.
Katie Paterson — Selected CV
Born 1981, Glasgow, UK. Lives and works in Scotland.
Education
2005–07 — MFA, Slade School of Fine Art, London
2000–04 — Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh
Representation
Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh
James Cohan, New York
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2026 — Afterlife, Collective, Edinburgh (touring)
2026 — Echoes Among the Stars, UCCA Dune, Beidaihe, China (forthcoming)
2025 — Afterlife, Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone
2025 — There is another sky, James Cohan, New York
2022 — Requiem, Ingleby, Edinburgh
2022 — Evergreen, Galleri F15, Moss, Norway
2021 — To Burn, Forest, Fire, IHME Helsinki
2020 — NOW, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
2019 — A place that exists only in moonlight, Turner Contemporary, Margate
2016 — Syzygy, The Lowry, Manchester
Selected Commissions & Projects
2022 — Mirage, permanent public sculpture, Apple Park, Cupertino (with Zeller & Moye)
2021 — Ideas, permanent commission, University of Edinburgh
2018–19 — Artist advisor to NASA
2014–2114 — Future Library, 100-year artwork, Oslo
2016 — Hollow, University of Bristol (with Zeller & Moye)
Selected Awards & Residencies
2016 — Winner, Arts Council Collection 70th Anniversary commission
2014 — South Bank Sky Arts Award for Visual Art
2013 — Honorary Fellowship, University of Edinburgh
2010 — Leverhulme Artist in Residence, Physics & Astronomy, UCL
Selected Public Collections
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
MIT, Massachusetts
Princeton University Library, USA
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Arts Council Collection, UK
University of Edinburgh
Frequently Asked Questions
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Katie Paterson is a Scottish artist, born in Glasgow in 1981, regarded as one of the leading conceptual artists of her generation. Working with scientists and researchers, she makes poetic works about geological and cosmic time, landscape, ecology and the environment.
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Afterlife (2025) is a sculptural installation of nearly two hundred ancient amulets, recreated by Paterson in materials drawn from endangered landscapes and fragile ecosystems — including glacial rock, Great Barrier Reef coral and stone from islands facing rising sea levels. It acts as a memorial to species and habitats at risk from climate change.
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Afterlife is on view at Collective, on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, in the City Dome Gallery.
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The exhibition runs from 19 June to 6 September 2026, open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am–5pm. Admission is free.
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Yes. Afterlife was commissioned by Creative Folkestone for the Folkestone Triennial 2025, where it was installed in a Martello tower until the Triennial closed on 19 October 2025. The Collective presentation is the work's Scottish premiere.
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The Folkestone Triennial 2025 was curated by Sorcha Carey, Director of Collective in Edinburgh, which is one of the reasons the work travelled to Scotland.
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Katie Paterson is represented by Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, and by James Cohan in New York.
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The exhibition runs through August 2026 and overlaps with the Edinburgh Art Festival, when contemporary art is shown across the city.
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She is widely known for Future Library, a 100-year project near Oslo gathering unpublished texts from writers including Margaret Atwood until 2114; for Earth–Moon–Earth, which bounced Beethoven off the Moon; and for Mirage, a permanent glass sculpture at Apple Park made from desert sand.
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Katie Paterson is one of the artists held in the Colstoun Arts collection, and her work speaks directly to our interest in landscape and nature. We are sharing news of Afterlife to encourage audiences to see this important work during its run in Edinburgh, Scotland.
