During 2016, an interactive art installation version of Lucy Burnett’s latest hybrid novel, Through the Weather Glass, is going on UK tour. Come join Icarus on a Lewis Carrollian journey – through the weather glass of climate change into the world beyond!
Icarus wants to rewrite his story. Yet the chance of finding a happy ending appear slim when he accidentally smuggles carbon dioxide into the atmosphere during another fall to earth, metamorphoses back to life as a woman & is informed by a nearby talking bicycle that they’ve been sent across Europe in search of a solution to climate change. If the nature of the quest weren’t already challenging enough, Icarus soon comes to question its entire basis – isn’t it arrogant to suppose that we can somehow solve the weather? Is imagining climate change apocalyptically really helpful? What if, instead of staring at our reflections in the weather glass of climate change, we travelled through it and participated in the world beyond?
Lucy Burnett’s hybrid novel, Through the Weather Glass (Knives Forks Spoons 2015), tells a fantastic, fictionalised version of the author’s struggles to understand environmental change during a 2500 mile cycle to the Greek island of Ikaria where Icarus fell. During 2016, an installation version of Through the Weather Glass is going on UK tour. By design interactive – comprising a bike connected to a power generator, a google earth animation of the cycle route, some collage poetry & photography, a writing zone & a large pair of poetry willow wings – the installation encourages us to think about climate change in new ways. Rather than seeking solutions or to persuade us of a point of view, the Through the Weather Glass installation playfully invites us to participate in negotiating more positive stories about climate change than the apocalyptic norm.
Will you help Icarus pedal her way through the weather glass into climate change world, and to craft some wings from poetry to help her to fly? For more details about the installation, the tour, the book and Lucy Burnett (cum Icarus) please see the links above.
Through the Weather Glass 