A Variability Quantifier: Liam Gillick's Red Weather Station on Fogo Island

Located off Waterman’s Brook Trail on Fogo Island, A Variability Quantifier is an artwork intended as an operational weather station, an experimental rig and a meeting point. The work is an evolution of my interest in understanding the origins of modern climate science. It involved the coming together of three sympathetic partners: Artangel, World Weather Network and Fogo Island Arts. UK-based Artangel has specialized in getting artists to do things in special locations for years and, as a final gesture prior to their stepping down, the two directors set up an organization named the World Weather Network. The WWN does not produce works of art, but instead links artists all over the world to a network addressing the climate emergency. The physical host and producer of this particular work is Fogo Island Arts and the National Gallery of Canada, who worked closely to get the project produced, functioning and engaged with the community. Even though A Variability Quantifier lives on Fogo, the work is part of the collection of the National Gallery of Canada through its National Outreach initiative.

From the beginning, I considered a new work related to Syukuro Manabe, the eminent Japanese-American climatologist, who created the first effective model of global climate in the 1960s. A tribute to the most pivotal climate scientist of modern times. I had already made work relating to his research for Cop 21 at Gare du Nord in Paris in 2015 and in 2017–2019 when I built a house in his honour in Japan. With the Japanese house, I had an idea to express the complex architecture of the project by including a small weather station on the site, revealing the underlying form of the building itself. On Fogo, A Variability Quantifier reveals this tenuous link to Manabe. It takes the idea of showing the structure of a building and turning it into a functional hybrid object – part data collector, part sculpture, part experimental rig – for others to use.

Years ago, I had seen documentary shorts by filmmaker Colin Low, which he had made on Fogo Island for the National Film Board of Canada in the 1960s. They included The Children of Fogo Island featuring children playing and growing up and, my favourite, Jim Decker Builds a Longliner of fishermen building boats. They are very stark and beautiful films. Through his work, I had the feeling that – culturally speaking – these might be familiar people, like my mother’s family in England, drinking a lot of tea and eating digestive biscuits with cheese in the afternoon, being taciturn. In Tilting on Fogo, I felt at home over a drink with people who reminded me of my father’s family, originally from Cavan in Ireland. The Fogo accent sounds much like my maternal grandfather from the southern coast of England. I was a little skeptical, however, on my first trip to Fogo Island a few years earlier, vulnerable to the beauty and to the romanticisation of the landscape and people. It wasn’t until I took control of the devastating views, glanced away from the people and began to focus on the vernacular architecture that I started to understand the history of lives on the island. During that visit, I was able to see one of the traditional fishing stages being renovated – and that’s what really stuck with me: the sense of the handwork with what is available in an economic and efficient way. The structure of the fishing stage stayed with me.

There is no official weather station on the island. The nearest one is in Gander. Only individuals maintain them. But this work has multiple functions. It is useful as a weather station, but it also celebrates the work of the people on the island – a kind of monument to their hard work. It celebrates the fact that, even today, the fishers and workers on the island still have those skills. They cut lumber, they hew it, they can knock it together, they can do anything.

 At first, I thought of a series of really small weather stations. And I wanted to put them in places where local people frequently go, like the parking lot next to the gas bar in Island Central, which looks like universal Canadian provincial government modernism. I think it is one of the most beautiful places in the world. It is where the kids buy deep-fried mozzarella sticks at the Cod Jigger and smooch in their Toyotas. I was encouraged to scale things up and walk up to a headland, a bluff overlooking the sea. For me, this was a concern. I did not like the idea of another white European guy coming to Canada and plunking down an unwanted object in the middle of a beautiful landscape. My childhood was spent being dragged around to look at such views by my parents, who both left school at fifteen and thought that taking me to look at a view somewhere, anywhere, would enlighten me a little bit. I realize that maybe it did. So, I thought, okay, we’ll go and look at this view. I was unsure about the idea, but I was going to do it, if it was going to be good for the island.

I had scaled everything up, but I was having problems making a computer visualization of the work in the landscape, and I hadn't been able to get the scale right between the model and the landscape. All I could achieve looked like something that was 75 per cent of real size. The new location, however, might make the work possible. The work would no longer be a tiny model or a full-sized framework of a building in a beautiful landscape, it would be a three-quarter-scale model of something in a specific location. And, even if you don't immediately recognize that conceptual difference, you feel it. It never feels like someone is in the process of making a building. The work is more prototypical and contingent. It is a framework standing on a platform painted RAL 3020 Red. It is the colour I use to differentiate my work from anything intended to be permanent or generic or structural. The red against the dynamic tones of the landscape signals an intention rather than an intrusion. It points to itself and shows that this is not something under construction, but is actually a kind of signal.

The local people building the work did so with an appropriate kind of functional indifference. It was a task, they were paid, and they did a good job. It is a multi-functional contextual artwork that one can sit on and use as a viewing platform. One can go up there at night, instead of sitting in Island Central in one's Toyota with one's dearest. One can go up Waterman’s Trail and hang out there instead maybe. And some young people clearly do. One can stop there after a hike because it looks like a place where one should stop.

I spent an afternoon up there, talking to a complete stranger, who had no idea what this thing was, but knew it was to be used and was some kind of “extra object” in the landscape that provided a moment of pause and reflection. Museums often collect works by artists that are symbolic archetypes of their practice. With the Gallery's National Outreach program this work is the opposite. It is specific, it is located, it is contextually determined. This is more at the edge of my expanded practice and therefore more representational of it.

The intention for the work has always been that it is a framework maintained as a site for measurement and experimentation. It is not “used” by the artist, but offered as a structure that is designated as a site for future measurement and for use by people on the island and researchers from elsewhere. The base-level operation remains a remote, autonomous weather station gathering local climate data and delivering it online. The site is monitored and maintained, and it is my intention that it be used as a lab for the introduction of new monitoring and measuring equipment and specific, targeted experimentation as time goes by. It should also have an educational function as a site for school visits to understand and explain the role of scientific modeling and data gathering in relation to climate. The work quantifies variability, not just in terms of climate and data but also in how art can be collected, while remaining functional within a changing context.
 

 

This article is adapted from the artist’s keynote presentation at the National Gallery of Canada’s Acquiring Differently Colloquium in November 2023. For details on A Variability Quantifier (The Fogo Island Red Weather Station), see the Gallery's webpage on the project, Fogo Island Arts and the World Weather Network. Share this article and subscribe to our newsletters to stay up-to-date on the latest articles, Gallery exhibitions, news and events, and to learn more about art in Canada.