Paterson has done several projects relating to melting glaciers; her graduation piece for art school, Vatnajökull (the sound of), featured a mobile phone number connected to a microphone submerged in a lagoon beneath Europe's largest glacier. Related work includes Langjökull, Snaefellsjökull, Soheimajökull, in which the soundscape of melting glaciers was created by making LPs from ice consisting of glacier meltwater. In one project she created a map of 27,000 known dead stars. Her ongoing project History of Darkness is a series of slides and photographs of the dark, all "numbered, and annotated with distance in light years from Earth." She has had solo exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford, Kettle's Yard Cambridge, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Selfridges, London, BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna, Haunch of Venison, London, PKM, Seoul. Paterson was the winner of a South Bank Sky Arts Award in 2014. and a Leverhulme Fellow at University College London. In July 2014, Paterson will send an artwork into space, to the International Space Station aboard ESA Georges Lemaître ATV (ATV-5).

In August 2014, Paterson launched the Future Library project (NO:Framtidsbiblioteket), a 100-year-long artwork in Oslo's Nordmarka forest and New Public Deichmanske Library and announced Margaret Atwood as the first Writer. She was included in the Towner Art Gallery (Eastbourne) 'A Certain Kind of Light exhibition showing from 21 January to 17 May 2017. http://www.townereastbourne.org.uk/exhibition/a-certain-kind-of-light/