At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the London-based artist Abi Palmer found that, immunocompromised and sequestered in her apartment, she “needed to touch and feel safe”. She could touch things around the apartment, sure, but she says she missed “incidental interactions with the natural world that surprised me, like when a leaf falls.” So she adopted a couple of young cats, naming them Lola Lola and Cha-U-Kau. Quarantined indoors together, Palmer decided to teach his cats about the weather over the course of a year. Abi Palmer invents the weatherthe resulting series of four shorts (one for each season), began airing on The Artangel website March 7.
While Lola Lola and Cha-U-Kau have been great company for Palmer, she feels bad that, as strictly indoor cats living on the third floor of a building, they would never experience nature and the world. outside. Unlike the US, where indoor cats are considered perfectly ordinary, “it’s politics in the UK,” says Palmer. “People think it’s cruel to keep cats indoors, so I immediately started questioning the ethics of having indoor cats (and pets in general).”
Still by Abi Palmer, Abi Palmer invents time (fog)2023 Commissioned and produced by Artangel
She decided to try to bring nature indoors, picking up branches during her walks to bring back to her cats, who sniffed them with great interest. Palmer began making diorama-like boxes—Lola Lola and Cha-U-Kau love cardboard boxes, like all cats—which she called “organized wild,” and started a project involving an indoor forest. for indoor cats. As the recipient of one of Artangel’s Covid-era “Thinking Time” grants, Palmer found a natural fit in the organization’s tendency to support unusual projects.
Each of Palmer’s videos has a seasonal theme: Rain for fall, Fog for winter, Light for spring and Heat for summer. She narrates the movies, explaining the weather to her cats as they interact with one of four specially designed cardboard environments, with perfectly sized holes to look (or walk) inside.
Still by Abi Palmer, Abi Palmer invents the weather (the rain)2023 Commissioned and produced by Artangel
“I’m not sure you’re going to get this, my friends,” Palmer begins his first film, Rain, “because there is so much sky that you haven’t seen”. She is then shown creating the box for autumn: gathering twigs, leaves and feathers from the forest, soaking them in collected rainwater and putting them in cheesecloth (“swamp fagots”) hanging above a metal bowl in the cardboard box – an attempt to recreate both the sound and the smell of rain for Lola Lola and Cha-U-Kau. In Fog, Palmer uses sage, sticks and candles to create a wintry mist. In Light, she soaks moss in water and sews it inside the box, hanging a small disco ball from the top to symbolize the refraction of the spring sun. And in Heat, she uses rocks and cacti, then makes a rotating urban landscape. In the end, she stacks the four seasons of the boxes two by two and lets the cats roam in them.
In creating her boxes, Palmer says she “tailored them to cats’ curiosity and weather elements they might miss.” She designed them as performance spaces, with specific days to film her videos but letting them play with the cats throughout the seasons they represented. She also installed a hidden camera in the dressing rooms, “like in a David Attenborough doc”. In the summer, one of the hottest in British history, she made a garden for Lola Lola and Cha-U-Kau on her balcony, so they could at least get some breeze.
Although climate change only appears directly in Palmer’s summer video, the larger subject of humans seeking control over nature is the main theme of the project, right down to the very notion of the indoor cat. “They’re so domesticated that they can’t go back to the wild,” Palmer explains, “and we all operate within those systems. When cats destroy the ecosystems of birds, we load the cat with that guilt.
She says the guilt should really fall on us humans for altering the natural world to the point that birds became endangered in the first place. “It’s like King Lear is shouting at the clouds and trying to chase the storm away,” she adds. “It is both the intelligence of man and the madness of humanity.”
- Videos in the Abi Palmer invents the weather the series will continue to air on Artangel’s website and video channels until March 28
