While researching in the Museum of English Rural Life and the Meteorology library within University of Reading, I was struck by the enduring sublime and Romantic nature of the meteorological accounts and terminology of storms, which invoke simultaneously sensual visceral and spectacular pleasure, excitement, fear, and awe; a sense of the uncontainable, that no technological instruments can as yet fully withstand.* 

Early meteorology experiments emanate from the colonies and, notwithstanding subgroups such as GirlsWhoChase, storm chasing remains a patriarchal and imperial pursuit.

The Beckettian and whirlwind nature of my mashed-up text and the speculative aspects of this artwork, also allegorically allude to Beckett's Waiting for Godot – invoking the tumultuous outpouring of Lucky's absurdist speech, and the temporal play of a situation-in-waiting for an allusive entity that may never arrive, entertaining conversations of the everyday, power relations, consumption, and tenuous nature of existence. 

The origins of this project in progress lie in a material-textual exploration of the site of the University of Reading Whiteknights campus – as the basis for a public art commission (to come).

The work arises from a conflict of interests and imperatives that I see as inherent in the intersecting values of climate change and art/language production, wherein problematic universalism collides with Romantic individualism; the conscience of art stares in the face of the sublime monumentality of climate change; didactic climate messaging typically self congratulates or averts the gaze; while landscape/land use is increasingly contested ground.

Climate messaging, from individuals and organisations, often entrenches these positions, as alternately catastrophic, self-congratulatory, didactic, idealised, conspiratorial, blandly universal, or politically romantic - inducing widespread inaction.

In addition, climate-focussed art and curation that seeks to address these issues risks failure for being either:

• tokenistic
• overly pragmatic, disappearing as art
• majority self serving and extractive
• exploited through green washing
• detrimental to earth, people, or future through its mode of production, without overriding reciprocal positive impacts.

Can we open a space in the midst of these competing demands that is both poetic and political, a space of 'æffect', that is inclusive yet uncomplacent?

I invited Uta Kögelsberger to show in my studio for Cubitt Invites 2025 as, for me, her work falls within this aeffective bracket.

*The terms sting jet and supercell were coined by emeritus UoR professor of Meteorology Keith Browning and Frank Ludlam following the significantly damaging storm that struck Wokingham on 9 July 1959.