UCC Professor of Creative Practice Jools Gilson is just back from a week-long stay in West Virginia, a heavily Republican state in the Appalachian region of the American South. Gilson was there on a residency associated with an exhibition called Mapping Climate Change: The Knitting Map and the Tempestry Project, which runs until mid-December at the Art Museum of West Virginia University in Morgantown. Mapping Climate Change is twinned with another exhibition called Our Votes, Our Values, which features photographs, prints, paintings and sculptural works from the Art Museum’s collection, and challenges visitors to consider how their voting decisions relate to their values.
It’s a topical subject, given that Americans go the polls on Tuesday to elect their next president. One might assume that the arts workers Gilson mingled with would lean towards backing the Democratic candidate, but it is a simple fact that nearly 70% of West Virginian voters backed Donald Trump in the last two presidential elections. So, how does she think things will go on this occasion? “The sense I got, from the people I met with, is that they are very nervous,” she says.
This is the third time in the past four years that the Mapping Climate Change exhibition has been installed at an American university; it ran at the Berman Museum at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania in 2021, and at the Kohler Gallery at Lawrence University in Winconsin in 2023. “I think the curators at Morgantown chose it to tw.
