MARGATE.- Turner Contemporary is staging the largest UK exhibition of Scottish artist Katie Paterson to date, paired with JMW Turner.

Conceived by Paterson as an ‘exhibition of ideas’, it includes the majority of Paterson’s existing works, which explore our relationship with the vastness and wonder of the universe; our desire to see the un-seeable, to know the unknowable. The exhibition also includes several new commissions and 30 of Paterson’s Ideas – artworks designed to live in the imagination – interspersed with works by JMW Turner.

Like Paterson, 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 watercolours from Tate’s collection making connections with her own works and Ideas.

“ It has been a great privilege to explore the preoccupation with colour, light, space and time that Turner and I share. In this exhibition, mountains of disappearing sand, exploding stars and constellations will connect with Turner’s renderings of moonlit rivers, erupting volcanoes and otherworldly sunsets. The landscape and light of Margate will merge with the artworks themselves. ” – Katie Paterson

For this exhibition, Turner Contemporary commissioned Paterson to make a new work, which encompasses 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 created 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.

Paterson's new book, A place that exists only in moonlight, which features over one hundred of Paterson’s Ideas, has been published to coincide with the exhibition. The book itself has been printed with cosmic dust.

Over the last 10 years, Katie Paterson (born 1981, Glasgow) has developed an extraordinary and unique practice working with scientists and other experts to create works exploring the cosmos, geological time and the material world. 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 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 100 books. A new text will be written each year by a new author, kept in trust and not read by anyone until 2114, when the library is complete. The authors include Margaret Atwood, Elif Shafak and Han Kang.

In spring 2019, Paterson will launch First There is a Mountain , a set of 'buckets and spades' in the form of world mountains, from which the public will build mountains of sand across the UK coastline. Turner Contemporary is one of 25 venues to host the event.