Currents and time move through us. The world moves us. Everything tries to stay still, but nothing can. Our atoms have lived as innumerable beings long before we carried them. We were rock, algae, star, and we often forget this in the effort to hold all of the now.

Bodies of weather, falling, holding, collapsing, merging, emerging. Bodies within, and bodies without. Our atmosphere brimming with dirt, rain, smoke, necromanced carboniferous forests, sulphurs, metals, acids, light, shadows, life and the remainders of it, all moving through us. Weather moves through land, through flesh, through systems. It unravels structures, interrupts paths, it moves us.

After my mother died in 2017, I was left to process the enormity of my family’s intergenerational trauma. It was, and remains, a mammoth undertaking that moves through me as a tumultuous and changing weather system, and at times causes bodily collapse. Trying to come to terms with its scale, across both damage and time, I began considering its aetiology through weather patterns: large systems moving through families, communities, and cultures with escalating and ongoing effects. Ever since, I have understood my body, my work, and culture itself as systems of weather.

There are old weathered words for the kind of attention this practice keeps. Augury, omen, auspice. Consider, from the Latin for observing the stars. I use them without mysticism. They name practical and embodied methods of being with a place, where conditions were read through bodies. Much of that everyday literacy has been displaced. We outsource it. We wait for a distant bureau to tell us what our senses have evolved to recognise in the environment.

The ground work of Bodies of Weather is a daily practice of bilateral drawing. Each day I draw with both hands at once, a haptic enquiry filling notebooks. This is weather taking notes. These drawings are often montaged within photographs, carrying embodied patterns of place into multispectral imagery. Wind fall and weeds, plants out of place, become a means of scrying. I learn from the chemistry and pigments of gathered plant material. Fermented, distilled, and ground, ink washes, blots, and calendars mark time and environment.

In photography I work with infrared and ultraviolet, long exposure, time-lapse, and astrophotography. Through smoke, water, light, and spectrums beyond our perception, patterns appear that are often invisible to humans: markers for other beings, signs of enormous diversity, traces of lives moving alongside us. I record sound beyond our hearing and shift it in time, slowing or speeding it until it enters our range. These methods allow me to meet what is present but often imperceptible, and to try to imagine the unknowns that move us.

Across the work, elements are layered. Images arrive through repetition, chance alignment, and the agency of materials. Form appears as a convergence of matter, a weathered mark, a remnant, a knot tied to remember, a record of time. A glimpse of an ecosystem and everything that passed through it. What has been and what remains. A body of weather.

This work holds the strangeness of everything else besides us. The multitude of beings, vegetal, fungal, algal, lichen, insect, all experiencing this world in ways I do not know. That unknowing feels like a kind of hope.

This work conjures a small opening. Weather scrying, bilateral proprioceptive drawing, and multispectral and temporal photography fold together to make a space in between. A place where the deeper, wider field around us becomes imaginable. We are composite beings, confluences of communities, a temporal arrangement of symbiotic and endosymbiotic life. The “individual” is a consortium. Nothing makes itself alone.

Time gathers around us, quietly expanding. I am not you. And still, something in us moves together.

This work remains ongoing.