Abi Palmer Invents the Weather in Collaboration with Cha-U-Kao and Lola Lola

Unable to reach the outside world during the Covid-19 pandemic, Abi Palmer began a year-long process of performing the outside world for her indoor cats Cha-U-Kao and Lola Lola, translating each season into a cat-accessible format.

Using foraged and found materials from local wildlife, Palmer creates DIY performances staged within a series of seasonal boxes in her spare room, engaging with the cats through movement, sensory interaction, and play. Taking a crucial feature from each season, Palmer broke down the elements into four boxes using sensory found objects from local woodlands to reinvent the experience of autumn rain, winter fog, spring sunlight and summer heat. The processes Palmer used to convey each season ranged from literal: the fermentation and distillation of natural materials to recreate the smell of rain; to figurative: Palmer performed the role of the sun by using a disco ball and stitching moss together into a wire mesh surface.

Each film documents Palmer’s meditative process of collecting fragments of nature and assembling the boxes. As she engages with the cats through movement and sensory interaction, the boxes become their primary play and performance space for the films. The accompanying voiceover, written and narrated by Palmer, is a love letter to her cats and the climate, and explores the tensions between what we can and can’t control. The resulting films are a playful meditation on disability, climate, and life that can’t talk back.

The four short films will be released week by week in March 2023, each accompanied by a live talk show held between Palmer and special guests, including J.R. Carpenter, Sop and An(Dre)a Spisto, Gabrielle de la Puente and Nick Murray.

The films form part of the World Weather Network, a new alliance of artists and writers reporting on their local weather from 28 countries across the world.

Rain

Rain is the first film from the series, and it takes on a literal interpretation of the autumn season. Palmer goes through a lengthy process of trying to recreate petrichor, the earthy smell which happens when it rains. She gathers up material from the forest floor and creates a rough methodology to distil the smell, soaking it in rainwater under a hunter moon, letting it ferment slightly, and then straining it through a crudely stitched cheesecloth ‘cloud’ into a silver bowl.

Abi Palmer

Abi Palmer is an artist and writer. In 2020, she was selected to be part of Artangel's grant and mentorship programme Thinking Time.

Key works includes Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020), a fragmented memoir, jumping between luxury thermal pool, and blue inflatable bathtub; and Crip Casino, an interactive gambling arcade parodying the wellness industry and institutionalised spaces. Crip Casino has been exhibited at Tate Modern, Somerset House, Wellcome Collection, and Collective Edinburgh.

Palmer has also been commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, BBC Radio, Vice News, Wellcome, the Guardian and Shape Arts. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation's Awards for Artists and Sanatorium was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize. The films form part of the World Weather Network, a new alliance of artists and writers reporting on their local weather from 28 countries across the world.

Commissioned and produced by Artangel.

Part of the weather station: London - find out more here.