Forecast: An Exhibition Inviting Slow Feeling Through Participation in Unstable Weather States

This paper presents a series of responses from Western Australian based artists and scholars from a range of disciplines including: meteorology, science, education, social work, psychology, art and performance studies, to a year-long exhibition titled Forecast in Gallery 09 at The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA). Forecast is a collaboration between AGWA’s Head of Learning and Creativity Research, Lilly Blue, Edith Cowan University’s Centre for People, Place and Planet artist-scholar, Jo Pollitt, together with artists Dianne Jones and Eva Fernández. The exhibition invites audiences to contribute to two participatory works: Weather Patterns , a daily changing installation that makes room for slow feeling, attention and care at a time of rising eco-anxiety and climate grief, and Disappearing Forests , which encourages participants to paint evaporating treescapes with water. Forecast was the stimulus for a discussion among and between interdisciplinary artists and scholars in reflecting on extreme weather, resilience building and the arts. This article proposes the embodied and participatory methods of the exhibition as a model for engaging in feeling with and responding to the climate crisis. Each of the responses draw on the exhibition to consider the ways in which Forecast in its negotiation of weather states opens up questions of response and responsibility, of time, pace and scale and, ultimately, how the exhibition invites audiences to engage in a process of slow feeling as they participate in and reflect on their experience of weather in the exhibition.