Documents artist Liam Gillick's process in building a functioning weather station for Fogo Island, Newfoundland.
A Variability Quantifier is an artwork intended to function as an operational weather station. Located on Fogo Island to the north of Newfoundland, it gathers local weather data and is a place for education, reflection, and discussion. A year after the installation of the work Liam Gillick returned to Fogo to make a documentary film about his work. This resulted in two separate films that make use of the same footage. In Variability Quantified we hear Nobel Prize winning climatologist Syukuro Manabe explaining the science of global heating and his pioneering work modelling earth's climate in the 1960s. In Quantified Variability the artist dramatically altered the natural colours in the footage and set it to a layered soundtrack of automated industrial production. This book is a record of the two films alongside a discussion with art historian Tom McDonough. With earlier projects in Paris, Japan and Australia, Gillick engaged in representing the science of the climate crisis. A Variability Quantifier collects data to feed into the global system extending his artistic elevation of the maths and science of our shared climate emergency.
After having studied at Goldsmiths College in London, Liam Gillick appeared on the English scene at the beginning of the 1990s, right in the middle of the YBA phenomenon. He has been noticed for his post-Conceptual practice, and his critical and curatorial engagement.
Winner in 1998 of the Paul Cassirer Kunstpreis in Berlin, and nominated in 2002 for the Turner Prize, his work has been widely presented in large exhibitions over the last ten years (Documenta, Venice Biennale, Manifesta, etc.). Respected for the rigor of the thinking developed in his work and writings, Liam Gillick's sculptures, installations, and textual pieces are also informed by a sharp visual sense of structural and formal material properties of the vocabulary he uses.
