2023-5
British Academy Small Research Grant: Principal Investigator.
A 2-year exploration of living with the weather as a lens through which to understand kinship.
This project, also called Wet Ontologies and Weathered Women Walking, included the creation of A Tarot of the Weather and a 2 day symposium on Island Narratives of Kinship and the Weather. The three titles opened avenues for three ways of thinking and making, and allow audiences to consider the multi-faceted nature of living with the weather as a lens through which to understand kinship.
Central to the creative outputs were a series of polaroids, taken on the island of Barra. They have been physically manipulated during development, bearing marks that echo the layers of experience that our bodies acquire through life, and evoking the traces within landscapes that allude to thousands of years of generational and multi-species interactions. Using polaroid images for the faces of the cards was intentional. They act symbolically as signposts to a past, and allude to an imaged analogue record of a world that existed before we were dominated by the digital image. Polaroid is an indexical medium, like a hand print. It provides a fossil record of a bygone experience. Polaroids preserve a reality, and are tactile,
relational, conversational. In this way they are a perfect medium to convey the past as an intimate and inhabited reality. They are also very plastic and highly manipulable. I scratch and smear and distress the image. These processes accentuate their perceived ‘historical’ presence. They have a patina, they have multiple stories to tell, some decipherable, some only to be guessed at. The untouched polaroid is already imperfect; the distressed polaroid wears its imperfections as unique tattoos that can seduce and repel simultaneously. Ultimately, these images became A Tarot of the Weather.
Laura Denning 