World’s Weather Diary is a collaborative project that transformed one day of weather observations from around the world into a collective visual diary.

On 22 September 2024, participants in different countries recorded the weather where they were using the same simple process: a cyanotype postcard and two heart-shaped ice cubes. Each participant received a kit containing two cyanotype postcards, ice-cube moulds, instructions and an envelope, and was invited to create their own record of the day.
The project began with a question: could the weather of one particular day be recorded not only through meteorological data, but through the physical traces left by ice, water, light and time?

The resulting postcards are individual responses to the same instruction. Although the materials and date were shared, every image is different. Temperature, humidity, sunlight, rain and the precise circumstances of each location affected the melting of the ice and the exposure of the cyanotype paper.

The project therefore sits between scientific observation and personal experience. Each postcard records measurable environmental conditions, while the resulting image is shaped by variables that cannot be completely controlled. The written observations provide factual information; the cyanotype provides a sensory and material record.

The individual postcards also become more significant when viewed collectively. Placed alongside one another, they form a visual map of weather experienced on the same day in different parts of the world. A local observation becomes part of a global record.
The project developed from my earlier work The Weather’s Diary, in which I recorded the weather on 102 days in Verona over more than a year. While that project focused on sustained observation from a single location, World’s Weather Diaryreverses the approach: one date is shared by many locations and many observers.

The project also considers participation and authorship. I initiated the structure and provided the materials, but the final work could only exist through the contributions of the participants. Each postcard retains something of its maker’s location, observation and experience, while simultaneously becoming part of a larger collective record.

The returned postcards have been scanned and brought together in a virtual gallery, arranged by date and country. The physical postcards are presented as an installation, allowing the individual observations to be experienced as a single, collective work.
World’s Weather Diary explores how a shared system can produce individual outcomes, and how data collected from many places can become a record not only of environmental conditions, but of human presence within them.