Broken Window

Yesterday afternoon when a friend mentioned that there was a heavy rain warning for tonight, I felt my body curl back towards the defensive posture that the last storm folded me into. I had let myself be lulled by a week of little rain and some glorious sunshine but it wasn't until noticing my physical response to anticipating another storm that I realised how viscerally I have been responding to the weather.

As I write, it's early, early Sunday morning, rain and wind have been battering my windows for hours of darkness and I long ago gave up trying to sleep. I used to enjoy the sound of rain falling heavily, but that was a couple of weeks ago, when I still maintained the illusion that being inside a house would keep me dry and safe. Then I found out just how fragile my sense of self is once the sheltering membrane of a house is breached by a storm.

This is the second of the series of three books made about the big storm of 10-11 July using prints in which meaning was washed out of the text. Turns out that those prints (made a week or two before) were the perfect expression of my response when the wind broke a window and the storm invaded the house like an angry soldier, bent on senseless destruction just because he can.


Broken Window is a unique book, letterpress printed on a Turkish Map Fold.
Photographs by Marguerite Kent.