Project presentations
Online
This series of video works is available on this page below, or on Artangel's YouTube and Vimeo channels.
Two Temple Place
Two Temple Place’s 2026 exhibition The Weight of Being: Vulnerability, Resilience and Mental Health in Art will be open 24 January – 19 April 2026. Curated by Angela Thomas, this new exhibition will explore artistic expression and mental health. Through depictions of deeply personal and collective experiences, it examines the powerful ways in which artists capture vulnerability, resilience, and their search for solace.
Rain
Rain is the first film from the series, and it takes on a literal interpretation of the autumn season. Palmer goes through a lengthy process of trying to recreate petrichor, the earthy smell which happens when it rains. She gathers up material from the forest floor and creates a rough methodology to distil the smell, soaking it in rainwater under a hunter moon, letting it ferment slightly, and then straining it through a crudely stitched cheesecloth ‘cloud’ into a silver bowl.
Abi Palmer, Abi Palmer Invents the Weather (Rain), 2023
Quad HD video, 12 minutes 4 seconds
Available to view on the World Weather Network website.
Fog
Fog is the second film in the series, which takes on a more abstract interpretation of the winter season. Fog explores Palmer’s own experience of brain fog and increased ill health over winter; clinging to the hope that nothing is permanent and “this too shall pass.”
Abi Palmer, Abi Palmer Invents the Weather (Fog), 2023
Quad HD video, 9 minutes 28 seconds
Available to view on World Weather Network.
Heat
Summer’s film Heat is the final one in the series. Palmer by this stage in the process has been thinking about the weather, and the climate crisis constantly for a year, and starts to feel unsettled. A hot and frantic mind trying to create and recreate as many small worlds and systems as possible, trying to align humanity in the crisis, reinserting man-made structures such as buildings and cars into our natural reverie. Palmer keeps asking herself the question: what is this project trying to do? Am I here to bear witness and grieve the death of a passing world? Or am I here to resist it?
Abi Palmer, Abi Palmer Invents the Weather (Heat), 2023
Quad HD video, 11 minutes 5 seconds
Available to view on the World Weather Network website.
In The Artangel Collection
Abi Palmer Invents the Weather is a series of 4 short films, commissioned as an online project for the The World Weather Network, a constellation of weather stations set up by 28 arts agencies around the world, formed in response to the climate emergency. Rain, Fog, Light and Heat are seasonal works, made collaboratively with her two cats, that playfully meditate on disability, climate, and life that can’t talk back.
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Abi Palmer
Abi Palmer is an artist and writer. In 2020, she was selected to be part of Artangel's grant and mentorship programme Thinking Time, then in 2023 she created Abi Palmer Invents the Weather in collaboration with her cats, Cha-U-Kao and Lola Lola.
Key works includes Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020), a fragmented memoir, jumping between luxury thermal pool, and blue inflatable bathtub; and Crip Casino, an interactive gambling arcade parodying the wellness industry and institutionalised spaces. Crip Casino has been exhibited at Tate Modern, Somerset House, Wellcome Collection, and Collective Edinburgh.
Palmer has also been commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, BBC Radio, Vice News, Wellcome, the Guardian and Shape Arts. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation's Awards for Artists and Sanatorium was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.
Images: (above) Abi Palmer. Photo by Faith Aylward, styled by Mia Maxwell; (left) Abi Palmer, Crip Casino, 2018. Installation view, London. Photo: Faith Aylward, styled by Mia Maxwell.
World Weather Network
Running from June 2022 until June 2023, the World Weather Network was a constellation of weather stations set up by 28 arts agencies around the world.
Artists, writers and their communities share observations, stories, and reflections about their local weather, creating an archipelago of voices and viewpoints. These “weather reports” take many different forms: poetry, fiction, reportage, video diaries, films, photography, podcasts and more. Engaging climate scientists and environmentalists alongside artists and writers, the World Weather Network brings together diverse world views and different ways of understanding the weather across multiple localities and languages.
World Weather Network Artangel projects include:
Production Credits
A film by Abi Palmer
- Starring Lola Lola and Cha-U-Kao
- Producer: Marina Doritis
- Executive Producer: Michael Morris
- Editor: Rosie Taylor
- Composition and Sound Design: Nick Murray
- Casting Director: Abi Palmer
- Set Fabricator: Emma Leslie
- Colourist: Rosie Taylor
- Title Design: Ollie Palmer and Abi Palmer
- Script Supervisor: Kate Adori
- Studio Assistant: Sam Brain
- Trailers: Freddie Leyden
- Communications: Ava Szajna-Hopgood
Image: Still from Abi Palmer, Abi Palmer Invents the Weather (Fog), 2023
Credits
Commissioned and produced by Artangel. Supported by Artangel’s Guardian Angels.
Artangel is generously supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and by the private patronage of The Artangel International Circle, Special Angels and The Company of Angels.
