Aeromancy

'Aeromancy' is an ongoing sculptural and research project centred on the Royal Military Canal, an early nineteenth-century defensive waterway running through Kent and Sussex. The project constructs and inhabits the fragmentary history of an experimental wartime survey, allegedly conducted along the canal between 1940 and 1943 by the civilian geographer Harold Montague Kettering.

Kettering’s speculative research proposed that the canal might operate as an environmental instrument: a linear system capable of registering subtle atmospheric disturbances associated with activity across the English Channel. Working across sculpture, sound, photography, film, and archival material, 'Aeromancy' – the ancient practice of interpreting atmospheric phenomena as signs of events yet to come – operates ambiguously as artworks, scientific instruments and archaeological remnants.