Local Weather

Research Background: Artists have long depicted the weather and taken a broad interest in exploring issues related to the sky and its phenomena, especially during the period of the Enlightenment and the era of Romanticism through artists such as Constable and Turner. More recently artist Roni Horn has addressed the weather through her work with the inhabitants of Iceland to create a site-specific works and a publication. While weather, in its many forms is universal my inquiry was in the ways that an observation and representation of local weather phenomena could evoke more global and historical notions of weather. Local Weather consists of a number of photographic and silkscreen works. The work comprises photographs and text, sometimes in combination to create images that refer to extreme local weather events such as bushfire. This is exemplified in the works "Where there's smoke" and "Plague Wind/North Wind", which depict extreme close-up images of swirling smoke alongside a silkscreened text flocked with ash by John Ruskin from the "Storm Cloud of the 19th Century" to create a foreboding and ominous feeling. "The Formation of Clouds" is a manipulated image in which sections of photographs of the steam from the LaTrobe Valley power stations have been combined with an image of the landscape of the surrounding hills to generate an image of towering, overwhelming cloud. Research Contribution: While much environmental art refers to large, universal concerns, Local Weather takes subjects from an uncommon localised environment and presents them in the context of wider, global concerns. Local Weather was the result of an Australia Council for the Arts new Work (Established Artist) Grant and the 3-part work, "The Formation of Clouds" was acquired by the Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale for their permanent collection.