Elemental Insight, a touring exhibition exploring the relationship between art and the weather, is currently on at the Park Gallery in Falkirk.

This is the only Scottish showing of the exhibition which is part of a major arts programme for the Met Office, the UK’s weather forecaster, and features craftspeople and artists from the Devon Guild of Craftsmen.

The Devon Guild of Craftsmen is the focus for contemporary crafts in the South West of England, an area which has drawn many artists because of the quality of its light. It has been claimed that what makes the area special is that the sea surrounding the peninsula – the longest tongue of land in Europe – reflects light back up to the sky, and the humid atmosphere refracts it back again.

In the exhibition contemporary artists use local materials to capture moments where either subtle or monumental interactions of land, weather and atmosphere create a sense of a particular place and time.

Stephen Palmer, arts development officer said “Only four of the artists are painters, the other twenty exhibitors have used a wide variety of different materials and disciplines to show their responses to the weather or aspects of the weather, for example the qualities of light, the natural environment, erosion or ‘ice activity’. Together, the works provide an intuitive insight into the delicate relationships that bind us to our environment.”

Ceramicist Tony Lattimer created large ceramic vessels for the exhibition which are covered in sweeping marks of waves like those that gouge channels and banks of sand on the beach.
 
The exhibition is on at The Park Gallery, Callendar Park, Falkirk FK1 1YR from 14 January until 25 February 2006.  Opening hours Monday to Saturday 10am to 4pm.  Admission free.