Tempestry

The Tempestry Project is a collaborative fiber arts project that presents global warming data in visual form through knitted or crocheted artwork. The project is part of a larger " data art" movement and the developing field of climate change art, which seeks to exploit the human tendency to value personal experience over data by creating accessible experiential representations of the data.

Tempestries are made by knitting or crocheting rows in specified colors that represent respective high temperatures each day for a year. Multiple works are typically displayed together to show change over time. The project began in 2017 in Anacortes, Washington of "temperature" and "tapestry."

History

The first tempestry was created using 2016 data from the Naval Air Station on Whidbey Island, Washington. Emily McNeil, Marissa Connelly, and Justin Connelly, having read about climatologists trying to preserve climate research data in preparation for anticipated removal of such data from US government websites by the Trump administration, were "joking" that "we should return to more concrete forms of data storage."

In January 2017 McNeil, Marissa Connelly and Justin Connelly founded the project in Anacortes, Washington place, you can see stark change over the last 40 years or so. It puts it in their backyard." The project name is a portmanteau of the words "temperature" and "tapestry."

The organization offers kits including yarn, instructions, and a data sheet of daily temperatures in a given location. In 2017 they sold 40 kits and in 2018, 500. The 2018–19 United States federal government shutdown temporarily affected production for the US, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) restricted access to the databases used to provide historical weather data for the United States.

The concept was inspired by a similar fiberwork concept called a "temperature blanket", an afghan- or bedspread-sized project commemorating a particular year by working stripes or bands of colors representing each day's high or low temperature for a year.

As of December 2018 projects had been created by fiber artists in nearly every U.S. state and in 20 other countries.

Production

Each tempestry is knitted or crocheted, one row each day, in the specified color for each date's high temperature starting on January 1 and ending on December 31 for a given year in a single location to form a banner the size of a scarf that graphically represents a year of daily high temperatures in a single location.

Colors for each five-degree temperature range are standardized and temperature data is collected from the NOAA so that collected displays of work by different artists working in different locations and on different years can be interpreted as direct comparisons.

Because gauge is different between crochet vs. knitting, for different knit stitches, and among different crafters, finished tempestries will vary in length and width depending on whether they're created by the same crafter using the same stitch or are created by different crafters using a variety of stitches. Some crafters' gauge varies, and two works created even by a crafter with a very stable gauge using the same stitch will inevitably vary slightly.

Display

Tempestry banners are typically hung vertically, the first row (representing January 1) at the bottom and the final row (December 31) at the top, in groupings of two or more to show how daily high temperatures have changed year-to-year in a given location.

Project pieces were first publicly displayed in Anacortes, Washington

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