What’s the weather doing where you are?
Is it only in extreme conditions that we think of climate change and that the whole world’s connected?
I notice change more in my garden since taking time-lapse sequences. (Begun 29 April)
Italian parsley has grown high and gone to seed, hiding the poas beneath. Everything is green after recent rain. I think of the changes in grass seeds that Christine McMillan animates, showing us more closely the changes happenig around us.
Animating the dress dummy along the garden path, I was thinking of our connections with Antarctica. She rotates, like a machine, and I imagine her driving the climate changes here and there. Headless and handless, she has no clue of her impact on the world. I can identify with her, feeling the limits of my own capabilities and vision.
Last night I heard wind raging outside the bedroom, and thought of the high winds reported in Melbourne and at Mawson over the last few days. I felt a strong sense of our interconnectedness, through the atmosphere we share.
Final frame from a time-lapsed drawing:
a dress dummy shadow
turns over ice.
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Photo: Sue Walker
Ice fields of Canada
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Dear Lisa,
I’m here in Melbourne but have just returned from the Icefields in Canada and was very stirred by the incredible landscape, glaciers and skies.
Melbourne today was strangely warm and waiting as if some kind of storm or rain will come but we know it’s unlikely. Gardens are green one day and dusty and thirsty the next – how they survive is a mystery. No need to read the forecast any more which is strange for Melbourne – it always seems much the same these days – warmer than usual and dry.
Lisa I’m sure I’ve said this in the wrong place but hope you can use it.
Sue
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Photo: Sylvia Shard
Overlooking the valley of the North Saskatchewan River, Canada
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Photo: Paul Brown
Early morning contrails over London Road Station
Brighton, UK.
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Photo: Robert Stephenson
Melbourne, Australia
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Christine McMillan, Grass seed performance
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
Photo: Tracy Sorensen,
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Michaela Gleave, Cloudfield
Installation, Kudos Gallery
College of Fine Arts,
University of NSW 2007
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On Tuesday 30 October Margaret Brookes wrote:
Armidale NSW
In the process of house building the weather has been both a godsend and a curse…
Had a very stressful weekend…The insulation was installed in the house on Tuesday and Wednesday – on Wednesday night the heavens opened and it poured all night. It had not rained much for three months. On Thursday morning there were four large puddles on the floor in the house. For the next three days Mike and I have crawled over every inch of the roof several times. Our first thought was that the water was backing up over the edge of the tin. So we spent the day creating a wall along the 30 meters of the up side of the tin. Didn’t get finished.
The plasterers arrived at 7:00AM on Friday. They said ‘use us or loose us’. So we went ahead – with plastic boxes strategically placed in the roof. The only house where the plasterer has been told to install the ceiling with plastic boxes all over it! As they put up the sheeting we continued our work on the roof. Crawled into bed with really sore knees and exhausted on Sunday night having plugged every thing we could think of.
On Sunday night/Monday at dawn it threw it down again – the lightening woke me up at 4:00 am. The sky and wind reminded of tornadoes in Canada. Rushed over to inspect the house and again there was a drip on the floor where a box had not been installed above.
The plasterers came again on Monday, 7:00 am , and we again went up on the roof. We checked all of our work – took off all the 30 m of flashing and nothing had breached the wall. It had to be getting in somewhere else.
Then the plasterer asked us to pull the flue for the boiler up out of the way so he could put sheeting up there. We found the problem. It was the fault of every trade who stuck something on or through the roof. The chimneys for the toilet vents, the chimney for the gas boiler, the cables for the solar power and the internet cable, (i.e. everything that had a rubber boot on it) had not been sealed with silicon. When you push a pipe down through a rubber boot it causes the rim of the boot to fold inwards. This makes a nice catchment ledge for water. So water was literally running down the pipes and cables from all the unsealed boots. We have now sealed them. We will also now go round all the other fixings on the roof and make sure they all have large globs of silicon sealer on them (eg where the solar panels are screwed and bolted to the roof).Hope this will solve the problem.Thank goodness it did rain when it did with such a vengeance before we had everything completely covered with plaster.
I am a physical and emotional wreck!
The building site is a mud bath as it continues to rain heavily each day. All this water and we still don’t have hot running water.