Factory Weather Book

Working and reworking The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane, first translated into English by William Morris, Factory Weather traces the text back to its earliest known version, attributed to Adenet le Roi. What emerges is a translation that resists fidelity in favour of transformation: words become images, images become gestures, movement and sound, slipping the constraints of the page through continual acts of re-making.

Morris’s resistance to industrialisation is brought into dialogue with a contemporary Lancashire shaped by its industrial afterlives — fragmented, weathered, unevenly held. The narrative is rewritten as Factory Weather, a text grounded in landscape and movement.

The work also returns to the book as object. Morris’s Kelmscott Press edition formed the basis of the 1894 Tregaskis Bindings, in which seventy-six binders produced unique interpretations of the same text — an early model of distributed authorship, now held at the John Rylands Library. Factory Weather operates as both rewriting and rebinding.