Antarctic landscape, that massive indicator of climate change, is remote from most human experience. Working within the fields of Dance Improvisation, Drawing, and Interactive Media, Antarctic Animation explores ways of bringing the profound connections that some have made with Antarcica’s changing landscape closer to human consciousness. In this research, ways of communicating the kinesthetic responses that some have made to Antarctic landscape and its texts are being explored through animation to help connect audiences with the fact of climate change. Antarctic Animation is positioned within the further fields of Antarctic Arts, Polar Arts and the Arts of Climate Change. Artistic explorers to both the Arctic and Antarctic have written, spoken, painted, photographed, filmed and danced from experience of extreme remoteness. Some have returned with unfamiliar yet more accurate ways of knowing landscapes in their more familiar homelands. Their work seeks to communicate changed perspectives, offering metaphors through which to view our own landscapes afresh, as if for the first time. Coinciding with the dawn of Antarctic explorations, artistic explorers have been developing Improvised Dance, Drawing and Animation as ways to kinesthetically connect our internal and external landscapes, as our selves continuous with our environment. Our selves are defined as energetic entities shaped by and shaping our landscapes through space and time. Antarctic Animation joins these artists in kinesthetically describing landscape as the world experienced both within and beyond our skin. The proposition is that kinesthetic awareness of our selves in landscapes can raise our consciousness of climate change.
Chapter headings:
1 Literature Review
1.0.1 Landscape
Define what I mean by landscape. Discuss internal and external landscapes – my own and other peoples. Theories about this cnecpt. Dualism/monism. What is different about Polar landscapes? What is differentabout Antarctic landscape? Are the Poles merging more in our minds in recent years?
1.0.2 Polar arts
Meeting British choreographer Siobhan Davies was a turning point in identifying my field of artistic inquiry. Davies had worked in the Arctic in 2005, with the Cape Farewell project. She returned changed in ways I recognised in other Polar artists, and in myself after working in Antarctica. Watching her Arctic dance, Endangered Species (2006), and hearing her speak of the Arctic, I could hear the changes that others would know: a heightened sense of physical connection with landscape and urgency in seeking ways of engaging others with that sense.
This field is identified by content and purpose rather than medium of expression or academic discipline. Driven by changed perspectives, the work of Polar artists can take many forms and be shown in many contexts. Like their scientific counterparts, these artistic explorers have worked in extreme conditions, and often invented new ways of using materials immediately at hand. Stephen Eastaugh established Antarctica’s first Sculpture Garden (2002) at Davis station, using bits of metal, wood and cloth to create totem poles. He stitches like the early explorers did, into canvas and surgical bandage, but for artistic expression. Invoking a range of disciplines from the sciences and humanities, Polar art can contribute to social and environmental understandings. They can present the familiar from unfamiliar perspectives they have gleaned from the Poles. Davies’ video installation Endangered Species (2006) appeared in a specimen case in London’s Natural History Museum. Suggestive of a Darwin collectible, a dancing human-insect form demands we see ourselves differently. The creature demands we see ourselves as we see ourselves at the Poles: very small and endangered.
Davies described the fact of her physical connection with her environment – Central London – as heightened by her Arctic experience: “So the knowledge is that I come back here, and I know I am being physically affected every second of the day. But now I’m more aware of it because I was put in that extreme situation up there.” Other artists who suggest similar responses to the Arctic include David Buckland, Antony Gormley, Max Eastley, Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey. (Burning Ice – Art & Climate Change, 2006). Davies also changed her thinking about the role of an artist. Following fellow Arctic artists Heather Ackroyd, Dan Harvey, David Buckland and others, she now sees the value in making artwork as propaganda for climate change awareness, and of taking a more active part in climate change debates (in con, London 2008). She joined Ackroyd on a panel of artists and environmental activists at the Friends of the Earth forum, Poison and Antidote (London 2008).
1.0.3 Antarctic arts
As her student at the National Gallery School in the early 1970s, my early encounter with Bea Maddock had alerted me to the changed perspective one can return with from Antarctica. As an artist aboard the Australian Antarctic Division’s first Humanities Programme (since renamed the Australian Antarctic Fellowship program), she returned with new eyes for her home land, Tasmania. Artwork issuing from that voyage (v? 1987?) suggested new ways of identifying ones internal and external landscapes. John Caldwell, Jan Senbergs and Bea Maddock were sent to Antarctica by the Australian government in 1987 as “a major step towards bringing Antarctica into the Australian cultural experience.” (Boyer, 1988;11) They were sent into alien territory on an impossible mission: to help familiarize the unfamiliar. And yet, as Peter Boyer wrote in their exhibition catalogue (Boyer, 1988;1), “If works of art about Antarctica have a common element, it is probably a fascination for things vast, unknown and elemental.” Maddock’s monumental drawing, Terra Spiritus (1995?), depicts Tasmania as vast, unknown and elemental. Rather than rendering Antarctica more familiar, Maddock’s post-Antarctic works offer unfamiliar views of familiar landscapes; her experience of Antarctic territory, which she described as like going to the Moon (in con 19996), is brought to bear on her most familiar place. Knowledge of Antarctic landscape as vast, unknown and elemental can be discerned in in much Antarctic art. Yet more than that, the work shows knowledge of familiar landscapes as similarly vast, unknown and elemental.
Maddock’s seven-panel work, We live in the meanings we are able to discern was made it in Launceston in 1987, immediately after her return from the Antarctic. Seven canvas panels are linked through three perspectives of the landscape, running horizontally across them as three narratives of the one place. The land is drawn, written (or perhaps spoken), and photographed. The stratified composition of this work presages her monumental Terra Spiritus. Pencil sketches made in immediate response to the landscape have been enlarged and fixed beneath encaustic on canvas, as if embedded under ice. Drawn in the style of early explorers’ topographical drawings, her drawings are similarly made to chart coastlines newly seen. Drawing is used as a language to explore Heard Island, contouring of the known forms (of buildings, a flagpole) amidst the unknown forms (of ice, rock, mountain) . Aboriginal words – place names from the south-west of Tasmania – are cursively written beneath the drawings, evoking ancient connections of this land and Australia, as Gondwanaland. Tasmania and Heard Island could have once been physically connected. Photographic replications of a glacier, repeated in tones of ethereal blues and greens, are enclosed in small box frames beneath the whole – three beneath each panel=21. Like frames of movie film, the format suggests a times-lapse capture of the ever changing light and colour, impossible to fix in one frame.
1.0.4 Art of Climate Change
Land art, climate change art etc…Goldsworthy etc…
1.0.5 Art of Improvisation
1.0.6 Art of Dialogue
Public dialogue can occur between and with an Antarctic community and artists. Scientists and support personnel who work in Antarctica can show us its landscape from a range of perspectives, offering multiple views of that place that we may not have thought of before.
This on-line interface is a tool for researching ways to dialogue, through a Thesaurus of words, images, animations and scientific data; Maps; Journey narratives; B(Log), with interconnecting hyperlinks.
1.0.7 Dance
‘There’s a woman called Maresa von Stockert who’s a choreographer, who is doing a piece this Thursday and Friday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall which is based on …climate change. I think it works with ice.’ (Davies, 2008, in con.)
1.0.8 Drawing
1.0.9 Animation
1.0.10 Interactive Media
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2 Rationale
Why is this research important?
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3 Lab Report.
What did I do? How did I go about my research? What have I been doing and how have I approached it? Take readers into an understanding of my methods of inquiry in all its various forms (animations, drawings, paintings, movement, audio, sculptures, installations, archival pieces…). Take them into my laboratory. What worked? What didn’t work? What did I do with the material that I have collected? How did I arrange it, classify it, learn form it? How am I going to present these experiments?
4. Conclusion
What does it all mean? What can I show people that wasn’t understood before before?
5. Discussion
What has changed since I began and what more needs to be done?
Notes:
What part of this landscape does Siobhan Davies form? Is there any connection to the work of Stephen Eastaugh or Bea Maddock? Who else does related work? How might we understand these individuals as part of whole? Where does your work fit in or not fit in?
Is landscape a useful metaphor – would dance be better?