An Artist’s Book About Climate

In 2022 I spent a good part of the year working on ideas connected to climate—both the local climate close to home and the changing global climate.

Locally, I filled a sketchbook with drawings of the River Caldew. Each drawing was made from the same spot on the riverbank, using coloured pencils and a brush pen in a Khadi book.

At first I simply wanted to see what would happen if I drew the same scene in the same way, again and again. But the drawings quickly became studies of flow: how the water moves, and how it changes with weather and river events.

Around the same time, I was also experimenting with flow in software. Some of those experiments turned into large-format giclée prints—ghostly forms that still feel connected to the river drawings.

However it began, the work eventually pulled together two kinds of change: what I could see locally, and what global climate data has been showing since the 1950s—an ongoing rise in temperature that feels increasingly hard to ignore.

I fuelled the exploration with global atmospheric data from public archives, including UCAR and NASA.

Early sketches used wind data from the exact times I was on the riverbank. I overlaid marks onto scans of my ink drawings. The results weren’t right yet, but they felt like a step in the right direction.

From there I made a lot of work—tests, dead ends, and revisions—until it settled into what is currently the main outcome: a large-format artist’s book.

It exists as an edition of precisely one, hand-bound with waxed cotton thread.

I say “final outcome”, but it’s probably not final. After the book, I made a hand-drawn and painted canvas using water-soluble coloured pencils, ink, and water.

Even that feels like a step toward further development.