In an ambitious collaborative research project that moves beyond storm chasing as subculture or spectacle, Blinded by Your Grace draws on and reframes existing visual material made by women who intentionally move towards danger. The project considers risk not as an inevitable condition, but as an unevenly distributed privilege: one that requires access to time, mobility, and the social permission to linger, wait and voluntarily suspend protection. Registering storms for their beauty and intensity, the work asks who is permitted to approach threat, who is expected to remain safe, and whose proximity to danger is socially legitimised. Through extensive research and collaboration with women storm chasers worldwide, Chaplin Espenon advances a critical visual position in which storm chasing becomes an allegorical terrain through which broader structures of power, visibility, and autonomy come into view.
By gathering a diversity of contributions and harmonising them across the printed page through grainy, oblique reproductions that signal instability and the sustained presence of a female gaze, Blinded by Your Grace approaches risk not as spectacle or thrill, but as a deliberate condition of vulnerability. Here, to seek danger is not to court destruction, but to enter into a state of heightened attention — one that involves waiting, exposure, and the willingness to be undone by forces larger than oneself for the sake of devotion and beauty.
Risk is framed as a form of agency historically encouraged in some bodies and discouraged, regulated, or rendered invisible in others. Who has the right to pursue danger, and who is obliged to stay safe? Storms are approached as conditions that demand negotiation rather than conquest, holding beauty and threat, attraction and fear in tension. Within turbulent skies blacked out by dust, rain, and debris, the visible collapses and the politics of looking surface, as Chaplin Espenon works alongside her collaborators to choose proximity to danger.
