Rhona W Paterson
Details
Name
Rhona W Paterson
Job title
Visual artist,maker, writer and facilitator
About
Rhona W Paterson is a Glasgow-based artist, writer, and educator whose embodied practice centres on clay as a primal material for sensing, thinking, writing, and creating. Her work also explores the the revolutionary potential of soil, clay, and water—elements tied to survival, resistance, and self-determination.
Clay has historically been tied to vessels and their societal roles of function and containment, and serves as a lens to examines feminist critique and material culture. Engaging with theorist philosophers Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous around concepts of écriture féminine, Bracha Ettinger, and Luce Irigaray on models of intersubjectivity that resists patriarchal notions of individuation. She often uses fluid metaphors (breath, milk, liquid clay) to describe the porous, continuous relationship between self and other and material that shifts between fluidity and solidity as always relational and responsive.
In 2023, Rhona founded The First Hand, an atelier studio to expand her practice by integrating insights from neuroscience. Through this work, she examines clay’s ability to elevate consciousness, foster neurogenesis, and engage theta wave activity. The studio’s Clay for Quietude experiences reflect a call to “return to the source,” dissolving boundaries between mind and body, subject and object, as gestures in clay record lived experience to reveal radical approaches to being and making
Region
Glasgow