We love to talk about the weather. It is a social in with strangers, or it was a social in with a stranger until the dynamics of social interactions changed with the increasingly prevalent life mediated through the screen. This has significantly changed the way people interact in anonymous public situations. people don’t just strike up conversations with strangers in the way they once did, particularly in dense urban environments – where often the screen is used to avoid contact, to separate ourselves from the social toxicity of the environment, precisely to avoid that opportunity of a random conversation with a stranger.
The thinking behind the exhibition is to get people talking again, and once the exhibition is over to leave a legacy of a ‘space’ where that conversation can continue.
Curating the Weather
There are probably as many approaches to curating exhibitions about the weather as variances in weather itself. To push the metaphor though, there are certain climates to curate within. Often when exhibitions are created on the theme of the weather they show landscapes by the masters or seascapes, moody black and white photographs of clouds over the moors, maybe a weather instrument – all traditional fayre. All very literal interpretations or representations of weather. This is an approach I find too literal, too reductive.
What interests me is weather as metaphor. How the internal state, the human condition, can be represented by language associated with weather. How can this further be represented through metaphor using art as a medium. In my approach to curating ‘Weather as ’ I am attempting to engage the same practices, approach and milieu that I employ with my practice as an artist. A multi-disciplinary, cross fertilisation approach. The weather does not exist in isolation and nor we do we, no matter how much the professional enclaves wish to be discrete and exclusive. It is of us and we are of it. It would be incomprehensible for me to think about developing an exhibition about weather as metaphor without designing it with philosophers, psychologists, meteorologists, cultural critics etc all included from the start.
Details from Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre can be found here