From where we stand, the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.
—TONY HILLERMAN

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
—MARCEL PROUST

Molybdomancy (in German: Bleigießen, “lead pouring”) is a technique of reading your fortune by pouring molten lead or tin into cold water. The resulting solid metal shape is then interpreted as a forecast for the coming year. The tradition is commonly practiced on New Year’s Eve (Sylvester) in Germany and other Northern European and Nordic States, although it is believed to have originated in ancient Greece.

We have used this technique as the basis for our proposed sculpture Euchloe Ausonides Insulanus, at the UN Campus in Bonn¹. Rather than interpreting the forms as predictions, we treat them as physical records of an encounter between chance, gravity, and temperature. We see these symbolic and physical processes as a parallel for climatology and the challenge of forecasting complex, chaotic, dynamic systems such as weather. As Edward Lorenz summed up:

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

When our liquid metal sculpture turns solid, the physical properties and chaotic behaviour of these systems, such as fluid dynamics, are present in the turns, twists, flows, bubbles, explosions, ripples, waves, and sweeps of the metal surface. It is the weather turned solid.

A short note about the title Euchloe Ausonides Insulanus

Euchloe ausonides insulanus—commonly known as the Island Marble Butterfly—was discovered in 1861, the same year as the first recorded weather forecast² by Robert FitzRoy, who was a student of Sir Francis Beaufort, the inventor of the Beaufort Scale. Euchloe ausonides insulanus was thought extinct by 1908 until rediscovered in 1998.

Whether or not you attach significance to these dates—the earliest written weather forecast and the rediscovery of a presumed extinct butterfly—the butterfly became both a metaphor for change and a quiet reference to the "Butterfly Effect" of chaos theory. For us, the sculpture resembles a marbled butterfly caught somewhere in the process of metamorphosis.

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(1)

The UN Campus in Bonn is home to the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change UNFCCC.

(2)

North—Moderate westerly wind; fine.
West—Moderate south-westerly; fine.
South—Fresh westerly; fine.
—August 1, 1861, The Times, London.