An Artist’s Book About Climate

In 2022 I spent a good part of the year working on ideas about climate, both close to home and global.

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.

Sketchbook page — 28/5/22 page from sketchbook

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.

Caldew (giclée print) — Caldew — giclée print on Canson Aquarelle Rag — 16” × 12”

Eventually the work brought together two kinds of change: what I could see at the river, and what global climate data has shown since the 1950s, an ongoing rise in temperature.

I worked 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 were promising.

From there came a lot of tests, dead ends and revisions, until the work settled into what is, for now, the final outcome: a large-format artist’s book.

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

Cover of Climate Artist’s Book — 483mm × 279mm

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.