For early romantic artists the landscape was a sublime vista, terrifying and awe-inspiring but ultimately at the behest of the human. With the rise of technology and scientific enquiry this position has shifted: whilst we can now map, survey, enumerate and account for our environment more thoroughly than ever before, it has also become more agentive. Our technological reach has ensured that the sublime is no longer restricted to landscapes but encompasses remote communities, seabeds, arctic tundra and even the cosmos. These developments have consequentially reappraised the delimitation of the self. Authorial intention has been revoked and this has been felt most keenly in man’s relationship to nature and the art that reflects it. Where once nature was a mirror upon which the self could be explored, chiefly embodied in the concept of the sublime, nature is now contingent. Best expressed in trans-disciplinary discourses on the posthuman (Haraway 1985; Braidotti 2013), we have now begun to break down the centrality of a unified bodily self in the world (Latour 2005). Its breakdown is, however, not its erasure. The posthuman can be seen in part as a response to the anthropocene, that is, it is a re-imagination of the human, in light of what the anthropocene proposes. In the age of the anthropocene we are witnessing the ever-increasing reach of the human. This in turn has redefined what more or other-than-human is in an era where nothing is out of bounds to us.

This paper seeks to explore the material embodiments of these developments through the work of Scottish artist Katie Paterson as an example of the posthuman sublime (Gilbert-Rolfe 1999). Multidisciplinary and cross-medium, her work is concerned with immensity and particularity; global in scale with a lens that addresses land and landscape through ecology and geological time, her material is the stuff of the world, through which she tells the story of nature’s elusive phenomena. Central to this is the material ground under our feet: sand and rock, fossils and seashores. All are a means of examining how we relate to our immediate and distant environments, to the land that surrounds us and the natural world that we inhabit. Resolutely conceptual, her work also speaks to the history of the sublime and through the utilisation of technological and scientific procedures the posthuman sublime, which calls for a new relationality with the natural world in which it speaks back. For Paterson the artist is a facilitator for the voice of others, which are often, increasingly, non-human. In doing so art can no longer be pigeon-holed to a singular subjective, internal self but is realized or even dissolved across competing articulations. This paper considers how Paterson, as an example of the posthuman sublime, delineates contemporary wild spaces, specifically of the North, and ideas of material remoteness through her work. Through an anthropological lens I will ask what are the material and philosophical consequences for our understanding of land and environment in light of the provocations that her work proposes.