My Weather Diary is a meditation on cycles. With his daily photographs, Jari Silomäki tracks the rotation of weeks and years, of snow and rain, of books read and new relationships. Elections come and go, ice melts, school starts and old cars stop running. These revolutions swirl together and have the inevitable ebb and flow of a tide.

Silomäki frames the weather as an analogy for the news. Though we experience daily fluctuations in climate as particular to our geographic location, local weather is shaped by a global system. This entanglement is noted in a previous exhibition at the Finnish Museum of Photography, ​“As the news cycle and Silomäki’s personal life intertwine, geographical distances lose their meaning. When the project began over 20 years ago, the weather was not a politically charged issue. In our time, every atmospheric change is seen through the lens of the climate crisis.”

This exhibition at Pictura is the first time My Weather Diary has taken on this particular shape, with decades of history spooling along the wall. It brings to mind a timeline; the works are generally in chronological order, but not rigidly so. The form also borrows a bit from a musical score, with overlapping harmonies and years of life transcribed into irregular bars and measures.

Why should we pay so much attention to one life, and to old news, especially when the current news is so pressing and overwhelming? My Weather Diary may add to the weight of what we’re already carrying. But it can be grounding to see time compressed, to see from inside one person’s experience of the world, over decades of time within the longer arc of world events. The project brings some questions to the surface:

How much of the daily news can we hold inside at one time?

How does the media affect one’s psyche?

How shall we spend the hours of our daily lives?

And to what should we give our internal space?

When a picture shows a slice of family life and also tells of a world tragedy, there is a choice. Will we attend to one, or the other? This is a choice many feel right now. And the answer is not a clear one.

- Mia + Dalglish + Lisa Woodward


See more of Jari Silomäki’s work here