dampness

This project sprouted from my bus journeys bringing me back home to Leith from the city centre of Edinburgh during a damp winter. I started paying attention to a common phenomenon: thick condensation on the inner side of windscreens, often mirrored on the outer side by raindrops trailing down the glass. These surfaces are not only physical interfaces between two environments, a cold one and a warmer one; they also manifest the common resentment for Scotland’s harsh, damp weather.

My project, inspired by these ephemeral phenomena contemplates their patterns either randomly composed or amended by children intentionally ‘clearing’ the view. It is a collection of these unique and ephemeral layers observed in buses, glasshouses and flats.

Behind these glass surfaces, places and lives appear in the background: Edinburgh’s architecture and social rhythms. Dampness is a real issue in Scottish housing, with consequences on health and daily life; this series attempts to draw attention to this site-specific problem. Through a photographic recording of this both aesthetically valuable and socially problematic phenomena, I do not intend to condemn but rather to celebrate this encounter with such a natural thing as weather.