Apple HQ have searched the world to find the right artist to create an entrancing glass art structure at their headquarters in California – and that just happened to be Katie Paterson from Fife, Scotland.
Katie Paterson is an artist with dyslexia who explores humanity’s place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. She’s exhibited internationally from London to New York, Belin to Seoul, and her works have been included in destination artspaces such as the Tate Britain, The Guggenheim Museum and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. She’s broadcast the sounds of a glacier as it melts, created a map of 27,000 dead stars in the universe and sent a meteorite back into space – and ‘Mirage’ as the new installation at Apple HQ is called, seeks to reconcile every desert on earth, and ‘create a microcosm space that brings all these immense and diverse deserts right there to Apple Park’.
The sculpture, due to be unveiled in Summer 2022, will use sand from all of the world’s 58 deserts to create glass columns in the form of three wave-shaped structures in the shape of a desert dune. Paterson is leading the project, and collaborating with expert architects from the German firm Zeller and Moye, as well as dozens of artists, geologists and desert experts.
On the BBC podcast Only Artists with David Mitchell, Katie spoke candidly about her experiences with dyslexia. “I’m quite severely dyslexic. I can see things really clearly but I can’t get them out there in a semblance that makes sense with words, and so words are both my complete enemy but also it’s where all the ideas start because I write them down.
…Words were a great enemy for a long time and now I feel really lucky in that my language is the artwork that I do.”
You can find out more about Mirage at 9 to 5 Mac, and check out more of the amazing projects in Katie’s international portfolio of works at her website here.