Weathersounds: a video installation by Alexander James and Thomas H. Ford, occurring in the main gallery at the Australian National University School of Art on Friday December 21st, 6-8pm.
This work is responding to around two years of studying various aspects of clouds and weather history. Tom and I have been working together for some time now and this will be one of the first outings of this collaboration. It coincides with a presentation at the Visible Evidence conference at the National Film and Sound Archive next week.
Please join us for viewing, wine and canapés.
Weathersounds is a reflection on the history and present state of the atmosphere. In the light of current concerns about the weather, it revisits the birth of modern nephology (the science of clouds), and re-examines the moment in the early 1800s when our now familiar terms for clouds—cumulus, cirrus, stratus, nimbus—were first proposed. Consistent names for clouds allowed early meteorologists to begin to understand local weather in terms of global climatic systems. These names also inspired artists and poets to look up, and to discover in the clouds a space of shifting moods and fragile transient depths.
Dr Thomas H. Ford is an Australian Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, the Australian National University. Weathersounds draws on research completed as part of an ARC-funded project on Nineteenth-Century Climate Change: Atmosphere, Culture and Romanticism (http://rsha.anu.edu.au/c19-climate-change).
Alexander James is a Sydney-based artist currently represented by James Dorahy (http://www.jamesdorahy.com.au). Work on Weathersounds was supported by a Power Institute residency in Paris undertaken in 2012. Alexander holds a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the University of Sydney.
Loading ...
