Artists book 'a place that exists only in moonlight' by Katie Paterson, listing ideas for future artworks, 2019.

This artist’s book combines a creative approach to materials and concepts key to both art and science. It presents a series of Paterson’s ideas for artworks, some realised, some impossible, phrased to encourage the reader to develop their own ideas. It is a key work in Paterson’s career-long engagement with contemporary science, especially surrounding space and cosmology.

Each idea shows Paterson’s deep engagement with the universe, landscape, materials and time from the cosmic to the earthly. ‘a place that exists only in moonlight’ (the title idea) encourages us to think about how we experience the earth in its relation to the moon; ‘Stained glass windows ground down and returned to the desert’ makes us consider how we use our earthly materials; while we might hope that ‘A reset button for the universe pressed only once’ will never be developed.

Paterson encourages us to consider how we experience and engage with the world, with many of her works playing with our different senses and the materials from which we expect everyday objects to be made. The book is printed using what Paterson poetically calls ‘cosmic dust’ produced by grinding moondust, dust from Mars, ancient meteorites and asteroids. All have been donated by members of the Meteoritical Society.