Katie Paterson (1/7) Woman

“I found exactly the right job by pressing the wrong button.”

Katie Paterson, 29, the first ever artist in residence in the department of physics and astronomy at the University College of London. With my love of the stars, space, and women in the astronomical field, Paterson is the first on my TOP SEVEN WOMEN this week; one woman each day.

Some of her conceptual artworks are giant maps, others installations, but you cannot always see them. In 2007, approximately 10,000 people dialled in to hear the sound of a melting glacier via her live phone line. Recently, she exhibited a grain of sand ground to a fraction of its original size! Paterson says, “Works like the nano-sized grain of sand relies on my viewer’s trust, since it’s imperceptible. It’s really important to me that people do know it’s real…My work aesthetic is quite minimal. It seems to make sense, because I’m quite precise and quiet as a person. A lot of the subjects are quite melancholic on the face of it, for example, the Dead Stars…”

Paterson’s display “All The Dead Stars”, is a map of the locations of all 27,000 dead stars in our galaxy observed and recorded by human kind. “Where each star dies, it’s also the place where a million other stars are born,” says Paterson, “These intimate connections between things give you a sense of being part of something far bigger. Not to make you feel diminished but part of something immense and spectacular.”