Nara Belvedere.

Nara Belvedere’s studio is a former sewing room in a Manchester mill, two floors above a bicycle workshop. The windows face north. On the wall, unframed pigment prints of weather systems — not photographs of clouds, but the residue of a model that has been fed years of Met Office-style observations she gathered, cleaned, and refused to treat as “data” in the tech-company sense. “It is drawing,” she says. “It just happens to be drawing that can run overnight.”

Belvedere mints long-form series on a public chain, with the parameters in the contract and the outputs generated at collect. She will not train on other artists’ pictures, and she is polite but final about this. “If the work is a collage of the feed, the feed should get the invoice.” The decision makes her slower than the market would like. It also makes the work look like itself.

Colour in the recent series leans copper, bone, and a bruised slate — not because those are fashionable in galleries this year, but because those are the colours of a particular kind of northern light she keeps measuring. She pulls prints before she mints. “If it dies on paper, it was never a picture. It was a gradient with a story.”

The chain is a way of publishing a system. It is not a way of avoiding judgement.

She shows rarely, and prefers rooms where the loop can run without a hostess. Manchester’s mills, she says, are better at that than most white cubes: they already understand duration, noise, and the fact that a machine can be a colleague. Collectors who want a still for a lock-screen are gently redirected to the print.

We left with rain on the glass and a stack of notes that looked, on the train home, like a forecast.