Rhona Warwick Paterson

Rhona W Paterson is an artist living and working in Glasgow, UK. Paterson’s artistic practice, comprising of sculpture, performance, film, photography and installation often focusing on clay both as as a core material and as a tool for shifting states of mind.

Oscillating between theoretical concepts and visceral details, Paterson’s research attempts to create poetic coordinates in order to cultivate, fragmentary cosmologies of marginalised non-sovereignty. Taking cues from both mournful and undead histories of labour, illness and solidarity, her work is invested in recovering the gesture as an aesthetic mode. She often uses milk as a skin glaze for her work to describe the porous, continuous relationship between the animal self and unseen other, as a material that shifts between fluidity and solidity as always relational and responsive.

In 2021, Paterson founded First Hand, an atelier studio to expand and implement research from neuroscience and studies in consciousness. Through this work, she examines clay’s ability to elevate consciousness, foster neurogenesis, and engage theta wave activity. The studio performs a dual function of both cave and lab in order to dissolve boundaries between mind and body, subject and object, as gestures in clay record lived experience to reveal radical approaches to being and making.

Solo Performances/ Exhibitions

Whose Hand I Hold, Stallan-Brand 2024-25

Clay and Voice. Campleline Gallery 2019.

Steel and Other Elastics, Hollybush Gardens, London. 2018

Moving Dust. Intermedia Gallery, Glasgow. 2002.

Group Shows / Collaborations/ Performances

The Visitor Participatory performance, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Glasgow International. 2026

Pick It Up! curated by Morven Mulgrew, 17 Midland Road Gallery, Bristol 2025

The Past is Ever Present curated by Katy West, The Reid Kerr Gallery, GSA, 2024.

In Residence. Pacing the Void video installation, Octagon Galleries, RSA Lower Galleries, 2023

NiKi|NiKi Builds a Body (Performance) with Tessa Lynch 2022, GoMA, Glasgow.

Pacing The Void, (Choreo-poem) with dancer Eve Mutso, 2022, Mount Stuart, Bute.

Beginning a Line (Choreo-poem) with Eve Mutso, 2020-22, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.

Womersley: The Will of an Age , Zembla Gallery, 2021, Hawick.

Tethered (Performance with Tessa Lynch) The Drivers Seat, 2018 Cubitt Gallery, London.

Landfall (Installation) AK28 Gallery Stockholm, 2006.

Prisms & Shadows, Glasgow Print Studio, 2005 Glasgow.

Publications

Made on the Table. GoMA, 2022.

Site Report. Theatrum Mundi, 2022

Outwith; Of Lovely Tyrants and Invisible Women. Panel. 2020.

Day Moon. An Inn for Phantoms of Outside and In. (Martin Boyce) Mount Stuart 2019.

Ellipses, Threads, Facets. Technology // Mythology // Allegory, Scottish Ballet, 50. 2019.

Automata. Women on the Road, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 2018

Fear is here, Death is close. Victims of Geography, Dundee Contemporary Arts. 2018.

Room Sensed Motion. Work House (Corin Sworn) at Kendall Koppe for Glasgow International.

Lipper. Wavespeech (David Ward and Edmund de Waal) Wunderkammer Press, 2018.

Our Glass Menageries. Andrew Miller, The Good the Bad and the Ugly. NGC, 2016.

Seeing Round Corners. The Art of the Circle. Published by Turner Contemporary, 2016.

Life Rafts and Escape Hatches. Affiliate: Thinking Collections, University of Glasgow, 2016.

Look and Look and Look Again, Pier Art Gallery (Artist Rooms) TATE 2016.

Modern Scottish Women. National Galleries of Scotland, 2015.

Closing the Gap. Garth Evans Sculpture (Monograph) Beneath the Skin, 2013.

Fantoun, Researchers Observe the Movements of a Phantom City, Glasgow School of Art, 2007.

Arcade, Artists and Place-making, Commissioning Editor, Black Dog Publishers, 2006.

Poetry Pamphlets

Putty. Slo Mo Books 2017.

Armatures. Slo Mo Books 2019 (2nd Edition 2023)

Awards and Prizes

Scottish Book Trust Prize for Poetry, 2018

Associate Artist for Gallery of Modern Art, 2019-2022.

Research Fellow for Theatrum Mundi, London/Paris. 2019-22

Creative Scotland Award, Artist Development 2023

Creative Scotland Award, Go See Share, Berlin 2024.

Creative Scotland Award, Artist Development, 2025-26.