A new exhibition boldly goes where no artist has gone before... What’s remarkable about the exhibition — at least, one remarkable thing among many — is how coherent it is, and how consistent, conceptually and aesthetically.

(The Times)

In spring 2019 Turner Contemporary will stage the largest UK exhibition of Scottish artist Katie Paterson to date, paired with a group of works by JMW Turner.

Over the last 10 years, Katie Paterson has developed an extraordinary and unique practice. She has worked with NASA to recreate the smell of Saturn’s moon, Titan (Candle (from Earth into a Black Hole), 2015), and the European Space Agency to send a meteorite back into space (Campo del Cielo,Field of the Sky, 2012-1014). Of such collaborations she says, “I am asking people to access all they know.”

Paterson (born 1981, Glasgow) first captured imaginations in one of her earliest works, Vatnajökull (the sound of). From anywhere in the world you could call a mobile phone number to be connected to a rapidly eroding glacier in Iceland and listen to it melting.

Paterson is currently working on her most ambitious project to date. Future Library, 2014 – 2114, has seen her plant 1000 trees in a forest near Oslo which will supply the paper for an anthology of books, one century from now. A new text will be written each year by a different author, kept in trust and not read by anyone until 2114, when the library is complete.

This exhibition will include the majority of Paterson’s existing works, which explore our relationship as humans with the vastness and wonder of the universe; our desire to see the un-seeable, to know the un-knowable.

For this exhibition, Turner Contemporary is commissioning Paterson to make a new work, which will encompass the colour of the universe from its very beginning to its eventual end. Working with scientists who have pioneered research on the cosmic spectrum, Paterson will create a spinning wheel which charts the colour of the universe through each era of its existence.

Earlier this year, Turner Contemporary worked with members of the local community, The Conversation Agency and Paterson to explore the artist’s lifelong series of Ideas. These are artworks designed to live in the imagination, which take the form of short haiku-like sentences realised in silver. Using the gallery’s unique practise of ‘Philosophical Inquiry’ the artist’s Ideas were subject to intense discussion and scrutiny, resulting in the selection of three new Ideas to be made especially for this exhibition.

Like Paterson, JMW Turner was fascinated by the sublime wonder of nature, capturing the changing and atmospheric qualities of light, air and weather in his paintings, while also being deeply curious about science and the physical world. Paterson has selected a group of over 20 Turner watercolours and paintings to be interspersed with her works.