Judy Natal
Biography
Natal is a Chicago-based, hybrid photographic artist, curator, writer, and Professor Emeritus in the Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago. An archive of her environmentally focused work was established at The Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2012. Her videos and photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally including the Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil and FotoFest Biennial “Changing Circumstances: Looking at the Future of the Planet” in Houston, TX. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the California Museum of Photography, Center for Creative Photography, International Museum George Eastman House, Museum of Contemporary Photography and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others. She has received numerous commissions most recently collaborating with Houston FotoFest and the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) at Rice University culminating in a site specific outdoor installation utilizing 2 solar powered recycled shipping containers as a library and screening room with photographs; Burlington City Arts; Hyde Park Art Center, among others. Awards and fellowships include Fulbright Travel Grant, Polaroid Grants, New York & Illinois Photography Fellowships and significant artist residencies in Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Biosphere 2, and the Robotics Institute. Natal’s current project is “The Weather Diaries”, based upon 33 video interviews she conducted in Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Hawai’i, with a particular focus on Traditional Indigenous Knowledge (TEK) practices envisioned as an immersive exhibition with sonic landscapes, craft, video, still photography, archival materials, and speculative fiction narrative story components.
Project Statement for The Weather Diaries
Utilizing the imaginative power of written and spoken word, sonic landscapes and the descriptive immediacy of images to provoke conversations surrounding our climate crisis, The Weather Diaries (TWD) is a multidisciplinary immersive art installation and book project that teeters between nonfiction, speculative fiction, visual book, traditional craft and storytelling. Repeatedly traversing the island landscapes of Hawai’i, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland, Natal probes the emotional, moral, ethical, spiritual, and intellectual implications of climate action and inaction through environmental portraits, video interviews, landscapes, still lifes and intersectional environmental research. Islands serve as microcosms that uniquely encapsulate the environmental complexities we face globally as biodiversity hot spots, sea level indicators and conservation frontiers that form our ecological web.
The conceit of the TWD is the creation of the ephemeral, fugitive Weather Library where both the interiors and exterior are at the whim of atmospheric shifts. At the Weather Library, the Narrator, handed an umbrella and rain coat upon entry, is propelled by endless curiosity and unanswerable questions. She seeks information about what happened to the weather now that it is solely controlled by humans. She wonders what had come before and what will happen in the future - wandering through rooms in the Library in various states of weather. In each room she encounters individuals who share their wealth of knowledge gleaned from years of astute observations - of the weather, of the natural world, of human nature, of cultural practices, of traditions - and how change is inevitable, imperative and pressing. The archetypal naming devices employed focuses attention on the intimate knowledge of the character: what they know and how they know in relationship to the larger world, not who they are and where they are from.
The conceptual foundation of TWD is the profound ancient cosmology of native Hawaiian Aloha ‘Āina. Literally meaning “love of the land”, this core philosophy of Native Hawaiian thought and culture informs many aspects of life with values founded upon deeply embedded beliefs that we are stewards responsible for and to all living things. Natal’s resulting hybrid narratives are based upon collaborations with local community leaders, spiritual leaders, cultural advisors, artists, and scientists who share their lived experiences, research, knowledge, and lifelong observations of radically changing environments. Voicing shifting perspectives of climate change that exemplify Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and practices of stewardship. TWD contemplates our environmental future emphasizing our emotional, moral and ethical responsibility to act, illuminating binaries that separate Western science and TEK, building bridges between diverse knowledge systems to address climate solutions, practices, of traditions - and how change is inevitable, imperative and pressing.