Katie Paterson Requiem
Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh 9 April – 11 June
Undeniably seductive, both in the sweeping scale of its purview and the understated elegance of its presentation, Katie Paterson’s Requiem encapsulates Kathryn Yuso’s argument that ‘the production of the Anthropocene is predicated on Whiteness as the color of universality’.
From presolar grains of dust at least 4.6 billion years old, to genetic material from a snail that is extinct ‘in the wild’, Paterson has spent several years collecting a range of materials in order to, as the gallery presents it, ‘map the story of Earth from before its existence to the present day’. In a literal flattening of dierence and specificity, every material has been crushed into powder using a hydraulic press and presented in one of 364 hand-blown glass receptacles, neatly arranged in chronological order on waist-high shelves around the walls of the perfectly square gallery.
Paterson has described Requiem as her most political work to date. Certainly it asserts her right not only to acquire and destroy but also to decide the fates of some highly charged materials, her engagement with which is fleeting. Paterson reenacts the violence of settler colonialism by crushing a pestle (I hope the irony is accidental) from the Native American Hohokam culture; risks perpetuating extractive capitalism through an online purchase of conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo; and continues the nuclear colonialism of the military by crushing a coconut shell from Bikini Atoll.
In the centre of the gallery is a glass urn, into which visitors may pour the contents of one of the vials. A stage-managed experience of deep-time sublime, this process enacts a secondary destruction, not of the self, as in Romanticism, but of so many others.
Upstairs, Paterson presents several related pieces, including Evergreen (2022), a linen wallhanging embroidered with depictions of 351 extinct plants; and Endling (2021), a circular painting of 100 pigments comprising, as in Requiem, ground-up materials such as Native American tool-sets or Second World War barbed wire.
Paterson’s work characteristically combines childlike wonder with graceful aesthetics. Her most celebrated project, Future Library (2014– 2114), does so in a manner both generous and generative. But here, in adhering to the extractive logic of geology, the work unthinkingly rea¡rms old and ongoing violences, and fails even to notice as it does so. Tom Jereys