Winds Over Ottawa
An experimental art project celebrating Ottawa’s 200th Anniversary by
Adrian Gollner
Come make your own wind-drawing! Free! I will be setting up my wind-drawing machine in Ottawa Parks this summer and fall and welcoming the public to take part in this art project.
I am a conceptual artist living and working in Ottawa. In recent years I began to consider how to monitor our changing environment. One of my solutions has been to build wind-drawing machines, devices that direct the force and direction of the wind onto a drawing surface, thereby creating a visual record of the weather.
After several prototypes I succeeded in creating a machine that can not only records the speed and quantity of wind at a particular location but also changes in wind direction and gusts as well. The wind-drawing machine built for the 200th Anniversary of Ottawa is 9′ in height and can facilitate a drawing 38″ square.
It also occurred to me that wind has always been here. It cooled the necks of the lumberjacks as they ushered the logs down the Ottawa River; it rustled through the corn fields in the south of the city; it carved the snowdrifts along our streets; and, tragically, it pushed the Great Fire of 1900 across the river and over the Lebreton Flats. Creating wind-drawings today will allow us to consider the history of Ottawa in relation to the environment and our place in it.
I will be bringing my wind-drawing machine to Ottawa parks and allowing the public to make their own drawings. I can’t guarantee participants a masterpiece of contemporary art, but each piece will be unique and a record of the wind at a particular time and place. I will supply coloured Bristol board and markers for the drawings.
If you are interested in the larger wind-drawing project, please visit my website to see other incarnations of the wind-drawing project and related work: Current Work – Adrian Gollner
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