Drought Portraits & It's Not Just About the Rain
About
Drought Portraits and Its Not Just About the Rain are interpretations of historical data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) woven as abstract landscapes. The data drawn from represents dimensions of California’s climate (my home at the time) such as average annual temperature, annual precipitation, and the Palmer Drought Severity Index. With reference to images of California agriculture; I develop the patterns through spreadsheet calculations, coding, and weaving with California-grown organic cotton, dyed with a variety of plant dyes and mineral mordants.
The title, “It’s Not Just About the Rain,” was a frustrated retort to the ways I was hearing the drought spoken about at the time: It’s not just about the rain, it is about the effects of warming temperatures. It’s not just about the rain, it’s about the underlying systems that make it possible for fields growing food for the wealthy to be green while neighboring families’ wells are dry and they can’t afford to buy water.
Through these first Datascapes, I came to understand weaving as a way to attend to what is not legible in the data itself, creating a space to reflect on the social-political dimensions of climate change and personal relationships to a place. The practice of weaving is also a way to reinsert some of the time, labor, materiality, grief, knowledge, and embodied experience that is otherwise obscured when viewing climate data.