Weather

For the artist Antony Gormley and novelist Colm Tóibín, the unpredictability and drama of the weather is the connecting strand in their long-anticipated collaboration. In Antony Gormley’s delicate and light-filled drawings of the ‘liminal realm of the north Norfolk coast’, published here for the first time, he evokes ‘the blurring of perception between solid, aerial, and liquid’, using Chinese brushes to apply ink to water-flooded paper. He reflects on the drawings ‘as one might look at the marks left by the receding flood: dried salt on a rock, or the tideline on a beach.’

Colm Tóibín’s accompanying story, tender and deeply poetic, finds the protagonist on an Irish seashore in a torrential rainstorm that with other sights, smells and familiar phrases triggers memories of childhood summers decades earlier, when the vagaries of the weather disrupt his family’s leisurely enjoyment of the sea and the strand, as ‘the rain became hard, relentless, like something angry that had been released.’