The weather is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies in collaboration with the local organisms. Located on the birch-like pipe with the distinct function of “breathing” the air outside, this work speculates on what fungi might produce in a climate of dissent against environmental changes they are experiencing, and imagines ethnologist Jakob von Uexküll’s, Umwelt for bracket fungi in which only certain, salient aspects of the environment are available to ascertain.

These images are from the Grow Op 2020: Weather exhibition at The Gladstone Hotel, Toronto.

I am entranced by the conceptual term “Umwelt” developed by the ethnologist Jakob von Uexküll, which characterizes the perceptual world of an organism within which only certain, salient aspects of its environment are available to perception.

I see our term “weather” as an illustration of the limitation of our human umwelt, which allows us to only perceive and express those timelines and environmental factors to which we are attuned. The Anthropocene— the long duration of geological time, is not directly available to human senses — nor are the temporal rhythms relevant to particular non-human organisms as they encounter anthropogenic environmental change.