Artist set to create mountains on Northumberland beach

The artwork ‘First There is a Mountain’ created by artist Katie Paterson is a new artwork that aims to connect the public to the world’s diverse mountains on August 4.

The project involves the creation of ‘buckets and spades’ with which the public are invited to build mountains of sand and play out the world’s natural geography against the tide.

The five pails are scale models of five of Earth’s mountains: Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Shasta, Mount Fuji, Stromboli, and Uluru nested together. This unique artwork has been touring the UK, across 25 coastal venues since 31 March and ends on 27 October 2019.

A specially commissioned text is being read out at each venue. In Seahouses, Alastair Bonnett Professor of Social Geography at Newcastle University, has written a new text which will be will read out on the day by the artist Katie Paterson.

The Scotland-born artist is widely regarded as one of the leading artists of her generation.

Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change.

Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment.

Combining a romantic sensibility with a research-based approach, conceptual rigour and coolly minimalist presentation, her work collapses the distance between the viewer and the most distant edges of time and the cosmos.