OPENING // Mystery of Missing Westerlies

OPENING // Mystery of Missing Westerlies
A BRAG Foyer Space Exhibition by Ecological Gyre Theory

Auslan interpreted opening speeches (VRI)
Catering by BRAGS
Beverages by sponsors Grass Parrot Vineyard, Renzaglia Wines, and Cosmo Brewing
FREE, all welcome, RSVP essential

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) presents Mystery of Missing Westerlies by Chantelle Mitchell and Jaxon Waterhouse (Ecological Gyre Theory).

Mystery of Missing Westerlies is a body of work emerging in response to a news article from April 7, 1950 which details “extraordinary weather”; a local manifestation of global atmospheric change, being the disappearance of westerly winds across New South Wales in response to planetary changes sweeping the northern hemisphere. Working across installation, video and intervention, Mystery of Missing Westerlies considers pasts, presents and futures in an interconnected planetary atmospheric frame.

The disappearance of the westerly winds is itself both a historical anomaly and a planetary omen. We treat this climatic rupture as an atmospheric case file, a study in atmospheric disappearance, inviting consideration of the interplay between absence, evidence, and the forces shaping our world. Here, wind becomes both subject and metaphor—an invisible actor whose movements carry sediments, shape deserts, and drive oceanic currents, but also a narrative force whose disappearance tells of shifting global patterns. Embedded within this body of work are material traces of evidence and investigation, material clues in a wider investigation of climate, memory, and time.