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This work is written with Alutiiq artist Tanya Lukin Linklater’s The sky held me (rainfall on hands hair lips). This work was created for the Toronto Biennial (2023) and performed in High Park. In this text, I explore Lukin Linklater’s longstanding method of ‘open rehearsals’ with dance artists as a way of engaging with the weather and corresponding questions of sustenance and sustainability.

“In the lost & find museum” emerged as an ekphrastic response to ephemeral and embodied modes of awareness articulated in two essays which appear in this issue: “Humans in a Bottle” by Soft Turns and “On Felt Structures” by Tanya Lukin Linklater, both of which also appear in this issue.

How do we breathe in/ breathe in disaster? Artist Christina Battle’s Forecast series (2020—ongoing) explores what it means to breathe in climate disaster, using prompts and observations to encourage its participants to sense and anticipate the drastically changing weather around them. Critiquing environmental racism, Battle’s work highlights the “unequal distribution of air pollutants,” activating Forecast with communities in Newfoundland, Toronto, and Edmonton in works like the air we breathe (2022) and Learning the Signals/Change is Coming (2022/2023). This exhibition review of Forecast presented at Gallery 1C03 (Treaty 1 Territory) highlights the significance of community-oriented, intimate actions of breathing and observation to grasp how environmental catastrophes are felt differently across geographies. This essay is rooted in the author’s ongoing conversations with Battle, and takes cues from Christina Sharpe’s idea of weather, Kristin Simmons’ notion of settler atmospherics and adrienne marée brown’s principles of emergent strategy.

This project documents the confluence of weather and wildfire in visual first-person. Combining journal entries from the fireline, weather observations, collated map archives, and the vestiges of keenly registered physical experiences, this project explores the complicated physical and psychological testimony of fighting fire on the landscape. Beginning on a fire assignment in Idaho, June 2022, fire maps became a finely annotated record, documenting across days the collaborative forces of fire, topography, and weather. Now spanning multiple fire seasons, each cartographic entry gives a specific if cryptic window into the details that drive such labors upon the landscape. Adjoining the maps is a burgeoning compilation of fire-weather observation ledger book pages, decomposing, weathered, and continuously updating. These works coalesce into a post-fire material meditation. They are accompanied by a written narrative detailing one day plucked from many represented throughout this project.

“More Fuel You” is an ekphrastic poem in response to the essay by Gillian Moore,“Fire Weather Observations” in this issue.

Drawing loosely from a recent exhibition of the same name curated by Josephine Mills, Everything We Have Done is Weather Now, shares a collection of works by artist Lisa Hirmer that explore changing human relationships with weather, particularly as it entangles with lived experiences and understandings of climate change. Climate change is of course often associated with dramatic weather events and disruptions of seasonal norms; at the same time daily weather is often a site for locating and making sense of the material and cultural conditions of climate change. The photo-based works in this piece consider the ways in which climate change is registered, understood, shared, recorded through weather. The essay also considers how the works (which span from 2016-2022) act as a personal record of how understandings of climate change have themselves shifted alongside the rapidly changing climate.

An observational memoir unraveled from pandemic poetry about duck behavior interacting with the weather. The writing thread induces memory as non-sequential, and employs parataxis in vignettes, with no claims to live up to a Nature as individually experienced by a reader. Excerpted from a work in progress, a non-manual on Drawing entitled The World of Minuses.

This interview records conversation between American artist Joan Waltemath and Lakota Sioux elder Susan Roan-Eagle on the concept of “weather” in the Lakota language and the climate wisdom within that Indigenous worldview.

This piece documents a digital media/sculptural installation by the author that used windsocks to translate weather date into poetry about continued Indigenous presence, reconciliation to relationality to nature. The piece was originally commissioned by the Blackwood Gallery in Toronto, and this text first appeared in the 2023 edition of The Other Almanac (OR Books).

This paper examines transness as atmospheric ways of being connected to land, place and more-than-human bodies through the artistic practice of Jay Pahre, and more specifically his project The Weather Report (2024), begun during an artist residency on Minong (Isle Royale National Park) and developed while artist-in-residence at Western Front. The Weather Report is an online series of writings that are broadcast as weather reports every hour from locations across gichigami (Lake Superior) and minong (Isle Royale). The weather report gives us an account of transition attentive to intra-active forces of atmospheric pressure that are embodied, pervasive, and persistent. Connected to his prior sculptural work (Flipping the Island, 2019-ongoing) referencing the history of copper mining in the area, and resulting collapse of wolf and other mega ecologies, the Weather Report takes up weather in what trans philosopher Hil Malatino calls ‘disequilibrium,’ where transness is “committed to exploring what it means to subsist and persist in and through such collapse: what it means to weather” [1]. Engaging with queer formations of climate change and geopolitics of national parks, the reports are vivid descriptions of the corporeal and the environment: a walking body as barometer, or a kind of atmospheric fieldwork. As Malatino states “atmospheres suffuse, infuse, seep, absorb, infiltrate, creep, inundate, saturate, encompass. Because of the porosity of flesh and world, they get into you, you get into them. They are everywhere and no-place, tangible but not isolatable” [2]. Grappling with Malatino’s writing on transness and weather to articulate an ‘otherwise’ beyond settler colonial violence, Indigenous scholar Recollet’s [3] work on radical relationality, and Stephanie Springgay’s research-creation scholarship on queer ecologies of walking, this paper presents a conversation on Pahre’s practice. An early conversation about Pahre’s work took place over zoom hosted by Western Front in Vancouver. The conversation has been expanded and edited for this essay form.

This article considers the concept of conservation from both a museological and ecological lens, locating its modern origins in the development of the mechanical hair hygrometer invented by Horace Bénédict de Saussure. Loosely employing the sociological method of a field study, the paper finds that ecological conservation and art/museum conservation not only share an origin but have begun to collapse back in on themselves in the face of climate change, where land art has become a “barometer” for rapidly changing ecosystems and protected living species have begun to be monitored with the exacting practices normally reserved for museum collections. It concludes with the arbitrary nature of what has the privilege—or burden—of being conserved, in relation to semiotic analysis (the arbitrary nature of the sign) developed by de Saussure’s Senior’s great-grandson, Ferdinand de Saussure.

In No Small Measure captures and expresses changes in atmospheric humidity. Five towers made from plum tree branches and human hair speak to each other as a community of fragile sentinels responding to humidity and building, when undisturbed, chords of sound.

Inspired by Jenkins and Hogan’s depiction of the Hunger Stones, Stewart began to consider the stones and rocks around her differently. Being with her granddaughter in a village in eastern Ontario on the banks of Lake Ontario, the lake called to her. Her granddaughter carrying a small stone and calling it Rock helped her consider the ways we name things. Stewart wrestles with words and hope at this time of devastating war and climate crisis.

Even among recent debates about the start of the Anthropocene, and despite the still polarizing political positions on the urgency of climate change, the hunger stones of northern Europe emerge as powerful witnesses to our past and present crises. At once both explicit and enigmatic, hunger stones marry the factual declaration of receding water levels with the elusive voice of past suffering that speaks to present drought conditions, embodying perfectly Ursula K. Le Guin’s assertion that “science explicates; poetry implicates.” The discourse of climate crisis is typically solastalgic; these stones, however, imagine a range of affective and aesthetic registers, most notably in the poetic and artistic warnings to future readers. The elemental media through which the hunger stones speak to the present is the focus of this essay.

Presenting their experiences as artists and researchers, Soft Turns question the western scientific compulsion to fully ‘know’ a subject, and the human desire to control one’s environment, which extends beyond the visible into the air around us. Noting parallels in the history of the internet and meteorology, they discuss examples of human intervention in thermodynamic systems such as the failed Biosphere 2 experiment, controlled environment agricultural and space travel research, and the energy intensive data centre industry. Critiquing capitalism’s dependence on extractive, exploitative growth in both material and immaterial dimensions, they argue that in our current climate emergency, investing in strategies to loosen western thinking and control is critical. With examples from their artistic production, they suggest that slowing down, learning from other ways of knowing the world, and looking to plants and other intelligences can all contribute to a reactivation of an empathetic, intimate engagement with our environments.

This poem was created in response and in relation to reading and re-reading soft turns’s essay “Humans in a Bottle,” which also appears in this issue.

This piece documents a panoramic abstract painting in high-resolution detail. The image is an exploration of weather as atmosphere (invisible but sensible) and the materiality of the way the pigment has been applied. It represents our relationship to natural forces and the environment, which can only be conceived of in discrete frames and moments in time.

Artist and scholar Leah Modigliani presents and writes about her series of photographs Cities of God. These collages show fragments of cities destroyed by natural disasters, digitally rebuilt on the surface of micrometeors. Named after Saint Augustine’s theological reckoning with the fall of Rome in the 5^th century, the artwork responds to the irreconcilable differences between an individual’s place in the world and the scale of global climate disaster.