This document outlines the context and methodology for a study examining artistic and other engagements with weather and climate through practices in landscapes. It discusses how weather has been de-culturated from a local, experiential phenomenon to a global, statistical concept. The study uses interviews and participant observation of landscape painters to understand how their artistic practices engage with and capture the ephemeral qualities of weather. Preliminary findings suggest their practices involve mobile and habitual encounters with sites, as well as capturing transient elements through photography, sketches, and paintings that blend stationary elements with blurred transitions. Memory also features prominently in how artists splice experiences across site visits.

1. Performativities of weather: towards understandings of
practices of weather and climate in places and
landscapes through artistic and other engagements
• Oliver Moss
• CCRI
• Supervisors: Owain
Jones, Carol Kambites, Nigel
Curry
• Contact:
o.moss@northumbria.ac.uk

2. Outline
• Context
• Methodology
• Findings

3. Context (I)
• Landscape – local, static, fixed, sedentary, site-
specific, rich cultural associations
• Climate – global, transboundary, cumulative
• A “de-culturating” of climate (Hulme, 2008)
• From: C18th – ‘weather wising’ (proverbs, sayings,
natural signs) (Golinski, 2012)
• To: “Nature as lived-in milieu has been
thoroughly domesticated” (Rayner, 2003)

4. Context (II)
• infrastructure: housing, roads, storm drainage systems
(Rayner, 2003)
• Order was imposed on seemingly chaotic and elusive
weather, first, by quantifying it locally at individual places
and, subsequently, by constructing statistically aggregated
climates from geographically dispersed sites.” (Hulme et
al, 2009)
• “The global climate model is a simplification of complex
realities in order to make scientific prediction” (Cupples,
2012)
• And thus, in turn, policy…
• e.g. the EU policy goal of holding ‘global warming’ to no
more than 2 C above 19th C global temperature

5. Context (III)
• A blunting of climate‟s complex geographies
• There has emerged in recent years a desire:
problematise knowledge claims
pluralise the meanings of climate and climatological
expertise
• particualrise climate experience (Endfield, 2012)
• “discourses about global climate change have to be
re-invented as discourses about local weather and
local physical objects and cultural practices”
(Hulme, 2008)

6. Context (III)
• Michel Serres – temps (time / weather)
• Weather - day-to-day properties of the atmosphere
and its short-term (minutes to weeks) variation
(temperature, precipitation, air pressure etc.)
• Climate – the average of long-term, seasonal or annual
changes in the atmosphere (Seaton, 2011)
• “The weather remains the primary idiom through
which a variety of publics make sense of climate
change, as witnessed and responded to in ordinary,
everyday-life scenarios, such as walking, gardening,
fishing, sailing and working on the land” (Geoghegan &
Leyshon, 2012)

7. Context (IV)
• Weather is “what it feels like to be warm or
cold, drenched in rain, caught in a storm, and so on.
In short, climate is recorded, weather experienced’
(Ingold & Kurttila, 2000)
• (Im)material and embodied engagements with
landscape-weather
• “weather enters visual awareness not as a scenic
panorama but as an experience of light….light is
fundamentally an experience of being in the
world….in the perception of the weather-world, earth
and sky are not opposed as real to immaterial, but
inextricably linked within one indivisible field”
(Ingold, 2005)

8. Context (V)
• The existing literature: a concern (largely) for
landscape's “grounded fixities” (Ingold, 2005);
• Walking (Wylie, 2002), dance (McCormack, 2002),
gardening (Hitchings, 2003), parkour (Saville 2008)
• Landscape painters (north east of England) – who
operate at the interface of earth and sky (material
and immaterial)
• Aim: To investigate the affects of weather in
(practices of) landscape

9. Methods
• 46 semi-structured
interviews carried out
• participant observation
(use of go-
along/mobile
interviewing)
• 8 x 30 day „weather
diaries’ secured
• document analysis (e.g.
artist statements)
• Gallery visits
statements atements)

10. Findings (I)
• Mobilities of arts
practice
• static, flat, pictorial view
of landscape
• http://www.youtube.co
m/watch?v=Y5GX4RQO2
dU
• movements
to/through/from site
• site/non-site
• Habituated
encounters/practices

11. Findings (II)
• ‘Capturing’/’fixing’/’harn
-essing’ the ephemeral
• role of photography
• preparatory
sketches/’studies’
• Painting as ‘long-
exposure photography’ –
capturing stationary
elements and
blurring/smearing/obscur
ing other aspects

12. Findings (II)
• Memory
• “Memory seems under-
considered in these….(nrgs)
which focus on the affective
performativities of the present
and the richness and creative
potentials therein” (Jones,
2011).
• Site / studio / Site / Studio
• ….spliced with memories of
previous encounters
• absent presence of wider
symbolic representations (e.g.
Turner’s Northern Tours)

13. Findings (IV)
• Materialities of
practice
• Rituals of preparation
• kit/rigs/self-
designed/-fabricated
equipment
• emotional props (see
Barratt, 2011)
• pigment/use of
natural materials

14. Thank you for listening
Oliver Moss
o.moss@northumbria.ac.uk