Weather Station: a research laboratory exploring links between ecology,place and performance on the shoreline of Morecambe Bay.

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Weather Station is a practice-led research experiment in ecological performance. By building a site-specific garden installation, Weather Station, I aim to stimulate an alternative form of ecological consciousness grounded in an aesthetic response to place and landscape. The key idea here is to explore and measure what it means 'to let something be' and to investigate art's role in resisting the increasing exploitation and commodification of the natural environment. Over three years as Weather Station grows and changes, the public, including local residents, will be welcome to pause and consider the site and enjoy its stillness. At Weather Station, diverse forms of site-based performance - storytelling, seasonal processions, gift exchanges and ritual activities - will be designed to stimulate awareness of the unique ecology of the place. The objective here is to use the ecology of the site to produce a human ecology of stories, insights and memories that will hopefully result in what I call a heightened sense of 'place-bound care'.Weather Station sets out to ask three research questions:Does the site heighten the visitor's appreciation of the area's natural environment, or intrude into it? Is it a place of inspiration and pilgrimage, or an aberration? Can aesthetic experience give rise to a new sense of care for the place, or not?In each case, Weather Station aims to challenge perceptions and conventions. Only time and observation will reveal if it is integrative or disruptive, or if it has the capacity to produce enchantment and surprise - key components in the ecological/aesthetic experience it seeks to provoke.In order to monitor how Weather Station affects our experience of being in that landscape it is essential to design methods of measuring responses to the work that fit varied audiences (random and invited) and varied interventions (static and time-based). For example, how will local villagers respond to a gathering for bread baking in a sculptural clay oven? What reaction will young people have when invited to construct a 'field' of temporary miniature weather vanes? Through a process of regular activity followed by feedback and reflection, I hope to use Weather Station to investigate the capacity of site-based art to reveal something that science alone is perhaps unable to do. As a result of this research, it is hoped that Weather Station will become a receptive and significant focus, a nexus where the very notion and practice of ecology is questioned and reassessed through an aesthetic lens.