It’s been a year since I started this research, yet I feel I have only just reached the obvious starting point: to bodily connect with the Antarctic landscape.
My proposition is that drawings made from movement responses to Antarctic texts can be used to animate profound connections that some have made to its landscape.
The 1955 Mawson diary of Jack Ward is one of the key texts with which I am working, providing a literary response to the changing landscape of Antarctica over a year.
Pilot workshops conducted to observe and visually notate gestural responses to this text have resulted in the animations Ice shadows and Estranged.
To understand other people’s responses to Antarctica, I need to understand the meaning of my own journey there. I need to make my own physical ‘stand’ within its landscape.
Today I felt strangely inarticulate, thrust into a kind of expressive void. Frozen! Beyond words.