Hannah Foley’s latest project, Wet Breath Exchange, is an exploratory engagement with the Bridgewater Jerry – a sporadic, dissipating foggy phenomenon that defines the onset of winter for Hobartians. The project invites participants to perform an exchange, record the interaction and submit their contribution to the archive. Over time, this digital library will become a body of work in itself – a soundscape of encounters spread across an infinite watery canvas.

“The Jerry remembers us, and the Aeriform Archive remembers the Jerry.”

No two visits to the Archive are the same. When you enter the Archive you’ll land somewhere within its watery landscape, encouraged to explore and seek out floating orbs of sound.

Historically, the Bridgewater Jerry has been difficult to pin down. In collaboration with Hayden Foley and Michael Conway (BoM, Hobart), the Archive features a fog forecast model that predicts the likelihood of a Jerry appearance in a 7-day window. We’re delighted to give this evolving model a special home as it continuously improves in accuracy through the confirmation of fog events.

We used wagtail-grapple to set up a GraphQL API for the content of the site. This allowed us to create a really beautiful and technically interesting frontend using NextJS, with react-three-fiber and three.js to create 3D elements.