Elizabeth Leonhardt - 2023

Artist's Statement

For my final project, I crocheted climate data from 1970-2019. This project comprises 600 data points from the past five decades showing the median monthly temperature for each month of each year, recorded in Salt Lake City by the Salt Lake Weather Service. The completed project has over 17,000 individual stitches, completed over multiple months, with each color representing a 7-degree temperature range. My project was inspired largely by temperature blankets, which are crocheted or knit blankets, typically with each row representing one day of a
year and showing the average temperature of that day. For mine, I adapted it by reducing each year to twelve months and basing the color on the median temperature for each month. Instead of each panel being the width of a blanket, there are shorter individual panels representative of each decade. I hope this project helps people visualize the increasing temperatures the state of Utah has seen over the past five decades, and that climate change is in fact a real threat to
human civilization.