Dear Simon,
Looking through an old journal, in search of something else, I found the print of an Email you sent me on Monday 12 October 1998. That’s nearly 10 years ago! You had just been to my exhibition, Terra Incognita, at Gallery 101.
Lisa
I had a long look at the video screen [actually an interactive CDROM] with your whimsical drawings. I love the fluid way you make things evolve into each other.
A few of the nude drawings had that fluid quality for me too – one in particular (can’t remember its number – maybe #37 – bought it).
To my eye, the paintings have an unresolved quality quite different from your other work – which is to say that when I entered the gallery space, I felt the wind as though you were on top of mountains. I felt you were unsure of your path place in the landscape as though you were scanning the horizon for more – that your eye was yet to settle. Bird-like. Perhaps you are a wedge-tailed eagle – circling circling – searching.
Overall, it makes me wonder if your life in Tas is a little unsettled. Just some thoughts – probably wrong.
Hope you sell lots of them and that the exhibition is a great success.
See you around – I hope.
Simon
I hope you don’t mind me including this letter in my Log. It gives background to my present search, which is another case of circling.
Looking through my journals from that time, I recognise circling and spiraling are recurring patterns. I gather fragments and put them together, to make some sense of a whole. I have been dancing spirals just lately, enjoying how they can move me, and are at the same time settling. The circle and the spiral reach outwards, to other people and places. I feel settled here in Sydney, knowing that at any time I can fly off, bird-like, and still return to a nest and a mate.
Yes, my life in Tas was unsettled then. Well spotted!
It is sobering knowing how much truth can be read into the work that we do.
.
Here is what I have begun to write, in answer to some of your questions:
How did I personally experience that (experience of) internal/external integration?
Like other expeditioners I spoken with who have experienced unusual sensations in Antarctica, I feel awkward talking about them. They seem too remote from the everyday. I also know I am not alone feeling awkward trying to describe them, struggling to find words to match the sensations. Jack Ward described words as ‘very blunt instruments’ and yet composed a most poetic Antarctic diary. Expeditioners have often used the language of the arts to communicate something of their landscape responses.
I am not saying everyone has had strange sensations in Antarctic landscapes, nor that they don’t happen elsewhere. I can attempt to describe some moments of my own there, when I sensed an integration between my body and the landscape, a feeling of at-oneness with the world. Each time was fleeting, like I had been somewhere else, and yet the sensations were physical. I could perhaps lie on a Freudian couch and find endless maternal connections, and stall for ever the telling of moments I find awkward reporting in public. Like Wordsworth’s field of daffodils, they are spots of time that stand still in my mind that have come from heightened sensation. Reflecting now takes me back to childhood, where spots of time were unquestioningly known, earthly, airy and oceanic.
When I was four years old I lived in New Zealand with my family on Harewood Airport. My father worked there as a radio technician. Standing beside him one day on the wide flat ground near a runway, we faced away from the few buildings there at that time. He explained how England, where he was born, was almost directly beneath us, on the other side of the Earth. From my small height I thought I saw, as I heard him describe it, the Earth curving around us. It must have been some time after that when I began digging a hole towards England. While I was digging I felt like this moment would last for ever, and yet it was quite transitory. But I knew in my body I was made of stuff the same as the Earth was made of.
On the voyage South through the Southern Ocean, there was one night when I was sleeping and waking though the night. The seas were high, and the ship’s stabilisers were screeching eerily as we pitched and rolled. For a very brief moment, somewhere between waking and sleeping, I felt the depth of the water beneath me, and myself beneath the ship. It was not a drowning nightmare, but a sense of connection with sea.
One late summer morning near Davis station I was practising Tai Chi on some ice. From within my heavy boots and protective layers of clothes, I began to sense my physical self releasing from beyond my body. Simultaneously, I felt the world enter me. I was dancing as one with the passing icebergs and penguins, acutely aware of everything in motion, of the movement within and beyond as continuous. I was not thinking, just feeling.
One afternoon I was standing on the lower of two peaks of Mount Henderson, a nunatack behind Mawson. I had climbed up there with a Field Training Officer, because it was very dangerous. I needed guidance to avoid a fall. I was looking down into a dark lake below, hearing blood pump through my head. At the same time, calls of penguins, miles away on the coast, entered my consciousness. The sounds of blood and birds merged as the soundscape of one landscape, inside and beyond me at the same time. I recognised the experience as similar to the one I had before at Davis.
Some assume that children and artists do not live in the ‘real world’. So I have been loth to talk about feelings, particularly with scientists. It is easy to judge sensory knowing by inappropriate measures. Featureless landscapes can play tricks with our senses, and as a child I could have deeply imagined the words my father told me. I could have been lucid dreaming on the ship coming South. And I understand that Tai Chi alone is mind altering for some. Like the faster circling Dervish dance, it can get people high. Antarctica is a featureless landscapes well known for tricking the senses. Perhaps because the air is thin there, and hard surfaces reflect, sounds can seem to travel further. And visually things are different. From the heart of this featureless continent, ice slopes to slowly to sea. Heights and distances are hard to gauge and can confuse your perspective. Like few other places on Earth, sensory reference points are few. Brief release from your ego is possible; you can escape your habitual self. Others have expressed such heightened awareness, from being in other landscapes. Perhaps I needed to go to extremes, to integrate mind with sense.
How can I understand how others have experienced that heightened sense of being?
I can come to know mere traces of what others have experienced, listening to, reading and and seeing their landscape responses. Responding to what they tell and show me, I can find connections with my own experience, and construe meanings through that dialogue. Understanding the heightened sense of being that I experienced in Antarctica is essentially impossible. A sense of being is multi-sensory experience, and essentially non-verbal. It cannot be reduced to words which are the language of logic. For this reason I do not expect to see inside another’s head and understand their sensations. Coming to know the experience for myself, and how it connects with my everyday experiences is a matter of trying out different ways to describe it: speaking, writing and making art. Dialogue with others helps…
After interviewing many Antarctic expeditioners, and listening for indications of an awareness similar to my own, I have encountered a wide range of responses.
Most expeditioners have gone to Antarctica for scientific and practical reasons: to count, measure, build and drill in the landscape. Many say they do not have time for aesthetic responses, and yet despite this, display other indications of connections.
British Antarctic survey scientist Dominic Hodgson, for example, told me that:
…one of the things, when I saw your website, that struck me…there were some comments on there of people actually being in the Antarctic environment and having these sort of experiences and feelings. And I have to say my first reaction was, when I arrive in the Antarctic environment, I never have that.
However, the sound recording of our conversation reveals great passion in his description of the landscape, and in his concern for its protection. And he did admit that after voyages he had time to reflect, and to marvel at the landscapes he has known:
And when you look at your photographs when you come back. In many ways, that’s the time when you really sort of appreciate what you’ve seen.
As a new member of ANARE, the association of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions, I have observed a reticence amongst its members in revealing much about their feelings. Jack Ward said in an interview (2007) that this was considered ‘unmanly’.