As part of Vegetal Encounters, my multi-year residency with the UBC Outdoor Art Program, I decided to cultivate a practice of attentiveness to the weather and its impact on the natural world. As part of this practice, I spend time on campus sitting still, attending to the weather and its effect on my body and immediate surroundings, including the plants, animals, insects, birds, and all the other-than-human beings on campus. I jot down observations, make drawings, and map out relationships.

These notations are transformed into a series of seasonal forecasts that appear on a rotating basis in the clerestory windows of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability. The forecasts are presented in a mirrored vinyl that reflects the changing weather conditions and the reader of the text. The reflection acts as a reminder of how we are all implicated in making the weather.

Holly Schmidt is an artist, curator and educator engaging in embodied research, collaboration and informal pedagogy. She creates site-specific public projects that lead to experiments with materials in her studio. As the core of her work, Schmidt explores the multiplicity of human relations with the natural world. Schmidt has been involved in exhibitions, projects and residencies at the Belkin Outdoor Art Program; the Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver; AKA Gallery, Saskatoon; Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver; the Santa Fe Art Institute; Burnaby Art Gallery; and Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, Vancouver.