WEATHER WATCHER

Weather Watcher is an installation and performance work that considers changing human relationships to the weather as both a planetary phenomenon and an everyday, localized experience. It looks at weather as a complex, nuanced entity—not just empirical measures of temperature and total precipitation but something that’s also about an experience of colour, light, moving water and wind, patterns of sky, animal and human activity.

Until quite recently, weather was a quintessential topic of polite if bland conversation, something both common and innocuous. But we are now surrounded by climate instability, unseasonable patterns and catastrophic weather events and that is no longer the case. Weather, as a topic of conversation has become something ecologically and politically significant.

Weather Watcher is based on paying careful attention to the meteorological phenomena that surround us, with a consideration of how our relationship to weather has shifted in this era of global climate change and ever-available digital data, where we are at once hyper-informed about global weather patterns and yet so often disconnected from the way weather plays out in relation to local experiences.

Given that abnormal weather and climate disruptions are difficult to recognize (in the context of everyday life) because weather is a system that is already highly variable by nature, it can be difficult to register the magnitude of climate change within a lived experience of the world. This project is about taking the time to carefully observe immediate, local weather and paying attention for signs of disruption that connect local to planetary conditions.