Paul Hobson, director of Modern Art Oxford, looks at an installation exploring how we relate to natural phenomena

In 1910, when British weather records began, the Earth passed through the tail of Halley’s Comet and nervous commentators — looking at the dark clouds of the First World War gathering over Europe — wilfully interpreted the omen as a hopeful one.

This year marks the centenary of the outbreak of the so-called Great War, and recent extreme weather has prompted commentators to ponder on the potential of the natural elements to create devastation akin to the all too frequent manmade disasters we have witnessed throughout history.

Our obsession with the weather is, of course, a national stereotype, interpreted by some as a way of talking about ourselves without the impoliteness of having to do so. This is because our experience of the weather is always a shared one, rooted intuitively in ourselves and connecting us to each other; it is a defining national trait arising from the erratic, usually underwhelming, weather we have in this country.

Travelling back and forth from Oxford in recent weeks, I have marvelled at a transformed landscape — familiar fields, adjacent scrubland, edges of villages surreally situated in vast bodies of water — and Oxford with its famous spires marooned against unrelenting torrential skies.

Coincidentally, during this time we have installed a new exhibition at Modern Art Oxford by a young British artist, Hannah Rickards, whose work draws attention to the way we experience natural phenomena like weather systems and rare atmospheric conditions — from the Northern Lights to thunder and mirage.

At the centre of the exhibition is a sound piece — a thunder-clap stretched and translated into a musical score and back again — which bellows out intermittently across the gallery, bringing the anxious environment of the world beyond our walls into a charged experience of the art works within. Rickards’ multi-sensory art focuses on the way in which experiences are both individual and communal and that, for those of us fortunate not to have been too affected by the terrible flooding of recent weeks, art provides a space for experience and reflection; a place for amplification and adjustment away from our day-to-day lives.

Art’s potency lies in its ability to translate experiences that we can all relate to into something inspiring and developmental. While we may not be able to control nature, art offers a site for shared insights into current events.