Rhona Warwick Paterson

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.

CV

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

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.