We were delighted, thrilled, and moved close to tears recently to learn about what must have been a months’-long endeavor at North Central Michigan College.
Though they tweaked the color & temperature ranges so don’t quite fit into the systematic visual Tempestry climate mosaic, they took our idea and inhabited it in a breathtakingly beautiful way. Kudos to these knitters and everyone who made this gorgeous climate-awareness installation a reality.
From a post about their rendition of the Tempestry Project:
North Central Michigan College. August 31, 2018
TEMPESTRY PROJECT
Nine women from North Central Michigan College combined their talents for knitting and art with their concern about the environment to create an exhibit now on display in the North Central Library. Inspired by the Tempestry Project and grounded in NOAA weather data kept at the North Central Weather Station, they created a series of long, knit works where changing color represents the daily high temperatures for one year. This data tells a story of how our climate is changing in Petoskey and on our campus.
Each artist knit two rows for one day of a specific year, from January to December. They used the same colors to designate temperature ranges across the project, so the years could be comparable. The NOAA data becomes a brightly colored representation of the high temperatures for that year, shifting from blues and greens to yellow, red and orange, and then back again to green and blue. Science and art come together to tell the story of our lives, our climate, in Northern Michigan from 2009 to 2017.
The women who created this project are Jami Blaauw-Hara, Jane Bowe, Kathy Bermain, Shanna Robinson, Dawn Swaim, Marcia Meyer and Carrie Strand Tebeau, all instructors (both full-time and adjunct) at North Central, Suzanne Shumway, retired instructor, and Melanie Leaver, associate dean of instructional technology.
Note of thanks from the knitters/artists: “This is a project that unites many groups across campus. Full and part-time faculty, administration and staff all came together to interpret scientific data in an artistic way. It is truly interdisciplinary.
Many thanks to Anne Morningstar for her design work for our information pieces and to Sara Glasgow for purchasing the yarn. We also want to acknowledge the work that the Physical Plant staff did to make this happen. Tim Roback adapted our ideas for the mounting of the work into a realistic and functional system, and many of the Physical Plant staff were instrumental in helping us to bring this idea to fruition. We could not have done this without them. Stephanie Davis was also instrumental in realizing the vision, by freeing up hanging space in the library.
