Judy Natal at the new CENTER

Join Judy Natal as she invites you into the surprising evolution of The Weather Diaries, a long term environmentally focused project exploring traditional ecological knowledge as pathways forward toward a sustainable environmental future.

Repeatedly traversing the island landscapes of Hawai’i, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland, Natal probes the emotional, moral, ethical, spiritual, and intellectual implications of climate action and inaction through environmental portraits, video interviews, landscapes, still lifes and intersectional environmental research. Islands serve as microcosms that uniquely encapsulate the environmental complexities we face globally as biodiversity hot spots, sea level indicators and conservation frontiers that form our ecological web.

What started out as a rather straight forward photographic project The Weather Diaries evolved slowly over years to morph into an immersive multimedia performance/book project with an experimental musician as sonic collaborator. Utilizing the imaginative power of written and spoken word, sonic landscapes and the descriptive immediacy of moving and still images, The Weather Diaries teeters between creative nonfiction, speculative fiction, visual book, traditional craft, visual art and storytelling.

Natal will share her book maquette, short videos, and photographic prints and welcomes questions about how she navigates the challenges of long term projects and expanding her art practice.

About Judy: Judy Natal is a hybrid photographic artist, curator, writer, and Professor Emerita, Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago. An archive of her work was established at The Institute for Art Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2012. Her still & moving images have been exhibited nationally & internationally including the Sao Paulo Biennial & FotoFest International Biennial. Her work is in the permanent collections throughout the US, Brazil and Europe. She has received numerous commissions, international artist residencies and Fellowships and performed The Weather Diaries across the US.