In the sunlit somnolence of London’s Senate House Library, four floors above the grassy quadrangle, treetops flutter outside an open window. Is it a breeze, a zephyr, an intemperate flurry? A faint chill shifts through the air. Where did it come from, how can we measure it or catch it by the tail in words? Such efforts we make to be precise, scientific, onomatopoeic, in our description of this phenomenon: the ever-changing atmosphere of weather.
Two artists have put their minds to this universal endeavour in Artangel’s captivating new project, A Thousand Words for Weather. Jessica J Lee is a writer, Claudia Molitor a sound artist. Together, they have created a multilingual dictionary of words and sounds for weather. It is embodied in several different forms through the library. A shimmy of weather words in different languages, white on white, appears like snowfall on a screen in the uppermost attic. Historical images of weather appear in vitrines in the marble hallways. There is even an echo chamber of both words and images in a miniature one-person library known as a carrel.
