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Abi Palmer
아비 팔머가 발명한 날씨: 비 Abi Palmer Invents the Weather: Rain | 2023 | 12’4”
Courtesy of Abi Palmer. Commissioned and produced by Artangel
Synopsis
Abi Palmer Invents the Weather: Rain (2023) forms part of a series developed during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the artist found herself largely confined indoors. Unable to access the outside world, Palmer began performing seasonal phenomena for her indoor cats, Cha-U-Kao and Lola Lola, translating weather and landscape into a format perceptible within domestic space.Using foraged materials gathered from nearby environments, Palmer constructs a series of improvised “seasonal boxes” in her spare room. Within these small, staged worlds she recreates sensory encounters with nature through gesture, movement and play. In Rain, the first film in the series, Palmer attempts to evoke petrichor, the distinctive scent that follows rainfall. Forest-floor matter is soaked in rainwater beneath a hunter’s moon, left to ferment, and then strained through a roughly stitched cheesecloth “cloud” into a bowl. As Palmer activates these environments with her cats, the contained spaces become sites of performance and care.
About the artist
Abi Palmer is an artist and writer whose practice moves across sculpture, text, film, and sensory intervention to explore the materialities of sick bodies, viscous matter, and ecological landscapes. Her work often attends to forms of fragility and transformation, drawing connections between bodily experience, environmental systems, and the politics of care. Recent projects include the mixed-media solo exhibition Slime Mother at Chapter, Cardiff and Site Gallery, Sheffield; the film series Abi Palmer Invents the Weather (Artangel); and the interactive installation Crip Casino, presented at Tate Modern, Somerset House, Wellcome Collection, and Collective in Edinburgh. Palmer is also the author of Slugs: A Manifesto and Sanatorium. Her work has been presented internationally, including the Frieze Corridor Commission (2023), where sculptures of copulating slugs were suspended from the ceiling, and Crip Arte Spazio at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Palmer was a Bloomberg New Contemporary artist in 2023 and is the recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation’s Award for Sculptors (2025) and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists (2022).