HORIZON FACTORY:
SISTERS OF THE CELESTIAL ORDER OF NEPHOLOGY

photo : Charlie Bouthillette, 2025

The Sisters of the Celestial Order of Nephology is an interdisciplinary performance project by Horizon Factory (Erin Hill and Nina Vroemen). Formed in 2019 during a dance residency at Studio 303 (Montreal), the project takes the shape of a fictive, pseudo-religious order: two blue-cloaked atmospheric nuns devoted to the study of clouds and the ephemeral narratives they generate. Through this speculative framework, the Sisters examine uncertainty, attunement, and ecological interdependence.

Central to the project are the practices of Deep Gazing and Scrying. Deep Gazing, a term coined by the Sisters and inspired by Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening, invites participants to attune to their environments through attention to the sky, bridging cloud identification and forecasting with embodied, sensorial, and intuitive modes of knowing. Complementing this, the Sisters practice Scrying—the art of prophesying through gazing—with the sky, identifying messages and meanings in the clouds beyond the art of forecasting. Together, these practices treat weather as a relational system, offering tools for cultivating intimate, personal connections to climate, community, and place.

Working across performance, installation, workshops, and writing, the Sisters position Deep Gazing and Scrying as both artistic methodologies and pedagogical tools for thinking through life within complex, interconnected systems. In 2024, they published Deep Gazing, expanding the practice beyond performance into a widely accessible book of embodied scores and meteorological texts.

The Sisters of the Celestial Order of Nephology have presented work at RURART (Cookshire-Eaton, QC, 2020/2024), Fonderie Darling (Montreal, 2020), Third Space (New Brunswick, 2021), Artscape Gibraltar (Toronto, 2022), CCOV (Montreal, 2022), SummerWorks (Toronto, 2022), Eastern Bloc (Montreal, 2023/2025), Performing Arts Forum (France, 2023), PIQUE (Ottawa, 2024), and Centre PHI (Montreal, 2025), with upcoming presentations at Agrégat + l’Espace (2025) and NERMA (Australia, 2026).
Most recently, their work appears on the cover of Espace: Art actuel no. 142, Prophecies, with a commissioned text by Fanny Curtat (January 2026). In April 2026, the Sisters will participate in a Plural Contemporary Art Fair roundtable on Prophecies.

Fanny Curtat’s feature article Divination and Contemporary Art : Thinking of the Future as Undecidable. More here about the issue here

photo : Charlie Bouthillette, 2025

How to Weather Together
New England Regional Art Museum (NERMA)
Australia, 2025

DEEP GAZING EXHIBITION

 

huge thank you to the team at PHI!
especially program currator Daniel Fiset

photo: document original , 2025

Sight and Sound: Gestures of Care

DEEP GAZING BOOK:
Small-print publication,  2024

☁︎

    

The Sisters of the Celestial Order of Nephology want to thank the people and places that have supported this work since its beginnings. Thanks to Studio303, RURART, Fonderie Darling, OBJECTO festival, Centre de Creation O Vertigo, Artscape Gibraltar, Summerworks Festival, PAF-Performing Arts Forum, Eastern Bloc. We thank and acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. We especially want to thank our celestial mentorsand honorary cloud sisters, Anne Bourne and Erin Robinsong. Two beautifully attuned and inspiring people who have helped us in thinking through what it means to be a part of the hydro-commons and how to attend to the environment sensorially, sensually, spiritually. & to Sydney McManus, our graphic designer, who has rendered all of these ideas into a gorgeous, playful visual language. She has put so much care in connecting with our ideas and materializing them through design.
Lors de sa deuxième édition, l’évènement À TABLE sondera la notion de territorialité en rassemblant différentes pratiques artistiques et agricoles qui (re)pensent nos façons d’entrer en relation avec les territoires, à la fois en surface, en profondeur et en hauteur. Les artistes et intervenant·es invité·e·s à faire territoire partagent une volonté de décentrer les humain·es de l’histoire et du territoire, de décoloniser les espaces et les savoirs tout en adoptant une multitude de points de vue sur le monde. Leurs intérêts se situent aux croisements de différents modes d’occupation et d’utilisation du territoire propres aux humain·es et au autres-qu’humain·es. Les interventions artistiques qui ponctuent la programmation porteront notre attention sur l’interrelation entre les règnes végétaux, animaux et minéraux, sur des phénomènes météorologiques, sur des traditions ancestrales ainsi que sur des pratiques contemporaines qui brouillent les frontières entre nature et culture.

all images by: Jessica Renaud, 2024




all images by Curtis Perry, 2024

DEEP GAZING RESIDENCIES:
Eastern Bloc & Performing Arts Forum

DEEP GAZING: SUMMERWORKS + ARTSCAPE GIBRALTAR RESIDENCY
summer 2022



This insight into clouds and reattuning to weather is significant information for the world today as we open to change with guidance from quantum work like yours, that activates beauty, irony without cynicism, and the infinite of the surreal with a loving gaze, as ways through.
-Anne Bourne

Let the clouds direct you in ways of seeing, slowing, being in-relation,and reimagining possible futures.

Deep gazing, led by the Sisters of the Celestial Order of Nephology, is an interdisciplinary performance project inspired by experimental composer Pauline Oliveros and her practices of Sonic meditation and Deep Listening®,

Oliveros asks, what does it mean to listen? In response, the Sisters ask, what does it mean to look?

For the SummerWorks Lab Horizon Factory shared how to identify messages and meanings in the clouds beyond the conventions of weather forecasting, and explain how to make predictions with cloud formations through a series of embodied exercises.
Huge thank you to Deep Listening practicioner and artist Anne Bourne was a consultant on the project.
and the generous support from The Canada Council for the Arts.

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Place Publique is a space for visual arts and the public, set up every summer on Ottawa Street in front of the Fonderie Darling buildings. Site-specific artworks, performances, and workshops activate and transform the space into an interactive platform that brings together artists and citizens. Through a variety of activities, audiences have unique aesthetic experiences in a friendly and festive open-air environment. By creating this site of expression, the Fonderie Darling affirms the role that art plays in enriching the community’s well-being and quality of life.

HORIZON FACTORY performed The Sister’s of the Celestial Order of Nephology August 27th, 2020 as #4 instalment of the Allegorical circuits for Human Software.

Curator: by Laurie Pigeon

In response to the covid pandemic masks were manditory at the event and the experince was also live streamed. The experience is now availble on vimeo: