Hospitalfield Summer Festival

On 9 August 2025, long-term collaborator, artist, writer and art-worker Alison Scott, represented the Year of Weather project at Hospitalfield’s Summer Festival. Alison created an installation that included resources alongside satellite images and audio from the Hospitalfield Automatic Ground Station.

During the festival, Alison used her handheld turnstile antenna to capture some of the last images from satellites NOAA-15 and NOAA-19. NOAA-19 played out the end of the festival; incidentally this was the last pass received by Alison from the satellite. NOAA-19 was decommissioned four days later on 13 August, followed by NOAA-15 on 19 August.

Throughout the day, Alison gathered ‘three words for climate’ from visitors and held a drop-in writing workshop, inviting people to contribute Weather Notes. The workshop participants responded to the satellite images and reflected on their own experiences of weather and climate.

Since 2024, Alison has been working with Hospitalfield, an arts centre in Arbroath, Scotland, to operate an open-weather Automatic Ground Station. Alison’s creative practice engages with weather, oil, and land. In this vein, her PhD at Gray’s School of Art focuses on art, forestry, and the commons.

For the Year of Weather, Alison installed a weatherised v-dipole radio antenna atop one of Hospitalfield House’s towers. The ground station was active from December 2024 until August 2025 and, after Svalbard, was the second northernmost in the network. Through the activities at the Summer Festival and her own weather notes, Alison connected stories from Hospitalfield’s past and present to the Year of Weather.

The Hospitalfield Summer Festival celebrates and educates about the food and drink production of Angus, through a programme of workshops, talks, art and music. The arts and events programme is curated with Laura Mansfield of Feast Journal and in 2025 focussed on the theme of Pollinate; live music was curated by SHHE.