Katie
Paterson’s universe is expanding. This is evident from Future Library: a
century unfolds (2019) the Glasgow-born cosmic explorer’s new twenty-six-minute
film commissioned by the National Galleries of Scotland. The film provides the
spiritual heart of the final edition of NOW, the Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art’s sextet of group-based exhibitions designed to show off the best of
living artists working in Scotland’s creative diaspora.
Paterson’s
film documents the six-years-so-far of Future Library, the artistic and cosmic
explorer’s epic century-long undertaking to bring together a new text a year by
a hundred different writers that will be kept unread in Oslo, where a forest
was planted in 2014 which will provide the paper for all one hundred volumes to
be published in 2114. The first writer to be commissioned was novelist Margaret
Atwood, who appears in the film alongside Paterson and the other five authors.
“We
wanted to make the film for this show to bring Oslo here and bring the project
here, because Future Library exists in many forms,” Paterson explains. “There’s
the forest, the room, the manuscripts, the authors, architects, librarians and
so on, but it’s hard to get a grasp of all the different things that bring it
together, so that’s one of the reasons why we made the new film for here.
“It’s
really documenting the whole thing so far, and taking a bit of a longer
viewpoint on it, because year by year we’ve been too involved to actually step
back and think, here we are, the room’s opening and we’re really rolling with
the project now. And for me to witness this – one year I’m pregnant, the next
year I’ve had my baby, the next year he’s grown up, and of course, when I bring
him this year he’s going to be completely changed again – my life changes with
that project. My whole family’s involved. I live my life alongside it, and it’s
really nice to witness those changes in the film.”
The
final NOW also featuring satellites of work by Darren Almond, Shona Macnaughton
and Lucy Raven. It is Paterson’s creations from past, present and future,
however, that form the centre of the show. This is the case from the Zen-like
aspirations of the eighteen texts selected from Paterson’s Ideas (2015-ongoing),
a series collected in her recently published book, A place that exists only in
moonlight, and here arranged on the gallery corridor wall in spacey silver
letters. In the exhibition’s final room, The Cosmic Spectrum (2019), is a large
spinning wheel which features all the colours of the Universe since the dawn of
its existence spinning in one continuous cycle.
Ten
other pieces similarly move through time, space and the sky at night. These include
Totality (2016), a disco mirror ball containing more than 10,000 images of
solar eclipses that beams out across the room. The sound of Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata permeates throughout the gallery by way of Earth-Moon-Earth
(Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) (2007) in which a
self-playing piano plays a version of Beethoven’s tune after it was beamed into
space using Morse Code. The presence of Future Library: a century unfolds is marked
by an accompanying print of a certificate that entitles the National Galleries
of Scotland a complete set of the texts that result from the project once they
are published in 2114.
“Even
though it’s year six of Future Library, it’s still the beginning,” Paterson
points out. “We’ve still got another ninety-four years to go, so it’s a project
that will outlive me, and will outlive everybody I know, except hopefully not
the really young generation. Future Library is one of the biggest artworks I’ve
ever worked on, and possibly ever will, because it goes on and on and on
throughout my whole lifetime, and it’s got all these different elements. When
you’re in the forest it’s one thing, when you’re in the library it’s another,
and watching a documentary film about it is another thing, but it does bring
you closer to it and brings you into this essence of what’s going on, which is
all related to time and space and light.
The
week before the opening of NOW, Paterson flew to Frankfurt, where she shared a
stage with Margaret Atwood to announce the name of this year’s Future Library
author, Karl Ove Knausgard, the controversial author of My Struggle, a forensic
six-volume warts-and-all dissection of his own life, published between 2009 and
2011.
“It’s
a big deal,” Paterson says, “because it’s the year we’re opening a whole new
library in Oslo, and he’s the first Norwegian author.”
NOW,
then, brings together the different aspects of Paterson’s increasingly infinite
Universe.
“Curating
it and installing it, it is a bit like a constellation in a way,” she says,
“because you’re taking what for me have been very separate works to make, but
they do all connect. Then, when you bring them physically together in the same
space, they unify through the inter-connection of things. They do different
things to each other, and unexpected things always happen. There are lots of
relationships between time and the relationships between ourselves, each other
and the wider universe.”
NOW 6
featuring Katie Paterson, Darren Almond, Shona Macnaughton and Lucy Raven runs
at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One) from October 26th
to May 31st 2020.
Scottish Art News - November / Autumn 2019
Ends
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