“I often say my work is about weather,” Michelle Atkinson reads, “but increasingly I think weather is the doorway rather than the destination.” This week’s guest on Art-Sci Currents is a weather data fine artist who spent twenty-five years as an award-winning graphic designer before leaving that career behind to translate storms, wildfires, and floods into glasswork.Her small confession about her work takes us deeply into the nature of her practice.
From Graphic Design to Data-Driven FineArt
Michelle’s career as a graphic designer asked her to translate complex information into something a client’s audience could understand at a glance. It is exactly the skill set she now uses in her studio, only in reverse. Where design hands an audience a finished answer, her fine art practice does the opposite. She takes weather and climate data (temperature readings from the airport
nearest a wildfire, a flood, or a heat wave) and traces the shapes those numbers make. She then abstracts those shapes further, removing any literal trace of the original chart, until what remains is a cloud-like, topographic form built from data but no longer legible as data.
That gap between information and feeling is the actual subject of her work. As she puts it, data does not change people; stories and experiences do. Her glass and mixedmedia pieces are her attempt to build a doorway between the two, an artscience translation layer that lets viewers encounter a wildfire or a flood as something felt rather than something scrolled past.
Simplicity as an Antidote to Overwhelm
Michelle’s theme for this stage of her career is simplicity, and it shows up in two places at once: in her materials and in her mindset. Trained for decades to build structure and justify every design decision, she is now trying to strip her work down, letting fewer shapes carry more weight. She talks candidly about how hard this is for someone whose brain is wired for order, and about slowly learning to let a piece sit unfinished for months rather than rushing it to completion the way client deadlines once demanded.
The same instinct drives her approach to climate communication. Rather than layering on more data, more charts, more clickbait-driven urgency, she wants to hand people one piece of a larger puzzle and let curiosity do the rest.
Beauty as a Quiet Form of Slowing Down
Perhaps the most striking idea in this episode is Michelle’s reframing of activism itself. She does not confront viewers with shock; she draws them in with colour, light, and the way her glasswork shifts as a viewer moves around it. In a media environment built to move fast and provoke outrage, she argues that beauty which makes someone pause is its own quiet act of resistance. Attention creates reflection, she says, and reflection is where change actually begins.
Entrepreneurship Without the Myth
For anyone weighing a similar leap, Michelle offers a refreshingly unromantic take on entrepreneurship in the arts. Full-time studio work rarely means just one revenue stream; hers includes sculptural fine art, a more commercial functional glass line, and teaching. Her advice for artists and art-scientists chasing grants or funding is equally practical: reframe the ask around the
community or the connection it builds, not just the project itself, and expect far more rejection than acceptance along
the way.
It is a conversation that moves fluidly between climate systems, glass chemistry, entrepreneurship, and grief, and
somehow never loses its thread. Underneath all of it is a single, quietly radical idea: that slowing down, simplifying, and choosing beauty over volume might be exactly what a noisy, data-saturated world needs right now.
Listen to the full episode of Art-Sci Currents to hear Michelle’s complete story, including her water-jet glass experiments, her thoughts on failure as a creative tool, and why she believes attention itself is a form of activism.
For more of Michelle, visit www.michelle-atkinson.ca
