I created Weatherscape in 2015 for my BA Hons Degree.

This project is built upon the English obsession with the weather

I wanted to create something that that everybody can engage with, as the weather is one of the most popular topics of conversation, which can be the opening line of a conversation or a passing comment to a total stranger, or a very worrying pressing issue with reference to climate change.

So, in this project, I looked at the English weather for the year of 2014 and created a system to construct a visual representation of that year's weather events; this is divided into the seasons as stipulated by the Met' Office and each day is given a vertical band in which the colours allocated to that day's weather is painted.

In producing this work, I have combined two genres of painting methods; Colour Field Painting and System Painting to create a piece that I feel uses my methodologies as a Colour Field Painter to great effect, but it would have been impossible to create it without the inclusion and implementation of the rules of System Painting too.

I wanted to take the subject of everyday, mundane conversation and elevate it into a visually stimulating piece which mapped the weather in the year 2014; I looked at how artists in the past had represented the weather and the seasons and for insight into the colours they used, I looked to the great masters Turner and Constable who became the main inspirations for my choice of colours.

My initial idea was to use these colours to represent the different weather conditions themselves, but , as my project developed, I realised that my colour choices worked better as a background to the main data and that using a selected colour scheme for each season enabled me to add an extra dimension than just stripes of colour for each day an I went on to experiment with glazes of various colours on different backgrounds which created different effects through the glazes, even if there were 'blocks' of days with the same or similar weather.

I knew that I wanted to represent the data for each day's weather separately which led to a stripe of various colours per day- this idea linked to the work of the artist Ian Davenport - although my stripes would be of a more complex nature, due to this, I also studied his fellow system painters Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst and realised, through this that the best way to approach this project- as I would be representing factual information would be with the creation of worksheets and a set of rules to work to.

The glazes that I created for the project were carefully mixed to compliment the background colours, they were all pastel shades which ensured that no weather event would be overpowered by another.

In the future, I would like to expand this project and encode other year's weather events into Weatherscapes; this could be used to map changes in our seasons and leaving gaps of five or ten years between each may serve to highlight these changes even more.