Animating Antarctic Landscape: Dialogues in Art and Science
01.
For most of us, the Antarctic landscape is not part of our cultural experience.
This landscape is a nesr pristine wilderness, whose ice has been collecting and holding information about climate change for millions of years.
It is important to understand what is happening in Antarctica for an understanding of our future.
It is important to hear what the ice has to tell us.
Animation, the visual language of change, can be used to respond literally and metaphorically, to the written, visual and aural texts of those who have worked, and are working, in Antarctica.
02.
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.
03./04.
Antarctica today is known mostly through the work of outsiders.
Writers, photographers, film-makers, visual and performing artists, are sent briefly down to bring us back impressions.
Today there are several programmes around the world that send artists to Antarctica.
05.
Their aim is to increase international awareness and appreciation of Antarctica’s natural beauty, and the work of its scientific community, whose values and cooperation shape its geopolitical significance.
A key value in all Antarctic research is sharing information about its environment, and way to interpret the data.
My research aims to contribute to an understanding of the changes observed and experienced in its landscape, through animation, from dialogues with those who have lived and worked there.
06.
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.
For, as Peter Boyer wrote in their exhibition catalogue, “If works of art about Antarctica have a common element, it is probably a fascination for things vast, unknown and elemental.” (Boyer, 1988;1)
07.
So what are the landscape perspectives of those who have lived and worked in Antarctica?
It was at the Sydney Nolan exhibition of Antarctic landscapes (1964) earlier this year that I met Jack Ward, who had worked in and around Mawson as a radio operator through 1955-56.
When I asked for his response to the landscape there, his language became quite poetic, and rich in visual imagery. He introduced me to his fellow expeditioner, Fred Elliott, who had worked alongside Jack in those days as a meteorologist. Fred was also an artist, and his response to the landscape was through photographs and drawings.
Here were some of the different views I was seeking, and they were willing to continue the dialogue. Their narratives since have become a close study for animating their journeys and perceptions. (This work will be compared to some present day landscape perspectives).
08.
I return for a moment to the first Australian artists to go with the AAD programme, because it explains something of the background to this project.
Bea Maddock’s large, seven-paneled work, We live in the meanings we are able to discern, reflects her fascination for things vast, unknown and elemental, the common elements of Antarctic art identified by Peter Boyer (1988).
Words fuse with imagery to stretch the eye across seven large panels depicting an expansive desert, where the only evidence of human presence is a campfire. Aboriginal place names are written in cursive script along the lower sections, evoking the ancient knowledge of lands long before Europeans so-called “discovered” them.
09.
On sighting Tasmania from the ship returning from Antarctica, Bea saw her home land with eyes, conceiving at that moment, the idea of drawing its entire coastline from that perspective (Maddock, 1996?).
Terra Spiritus, with a darker shade of pale (1993-98) is an edition of prints that when assembled in a circle map the entire Tasmanian coastline. Land features, with no hint of vegetation, are named in Aboriginal language in cursive writing, with their English names oriented in small metal type below. An edition resided in each of the major public galleries of Australia.
10.
I make this connection with Bea to acknowledge that my own perceptions have been shaped to some extent by her teaching at the VCA, where I was her student.
“We live in the meanings we are able to discern” (Maddock, 1987), she had said.
Her visual vocabulary involves lean pencil drawings made directly from life, repeating and evolving photographic images, and an integration of written and printed words and images. She worked in series, which I recognize as influencing the development of my own practice, particularly towards animation. Two other students at the VCA who were to include animation within their practice are Marshall White and Antoinette Starkovitch.
11.
“Terra”, Latin for “earth” evokes the elemental land, as opposed to the “landscape” constructed by humankind.
Even for those who have worked there for long periods, the landscape of Antarctica remains a void, challenging the limits of our perception. It defies our expectations of landscape as framed foreground, middle ground and background.
William Fox, a writer with a science background, explains these expectations from a biological perspective, arguing that we view through “inherited templates” based on the cognitive wiring of our brains that has evolved over millions of years inhabiting mountainous terrains with trees, rivers and lakes. (Fox, 2007;18)
So how can an unknown land be animated?
We animated within the meanings we discern.
12.
Terra Incognita (Roberts, 1995-2000), was my Masters research project, to build an interface to link some stories by Carmel Bird with some of the Tasmania landscapes that influenced their creation.
Here, the “terra incognita” (unknown land) was the workings of an artist’s mind.
The site map is an ice crystal form, with nodes to link internal and external landscapes: The internal landscapes were animated responses to Carmel’s stories, and animated paintings were my direct responses to the landscapes that inspired them.
There was a particular focus on Mount Arthur, a significant landscape feature nearby where she grew up, and where I lived during that time. I animated the changes perceived in its light and colour through a series of paintings made over a year.
13.
“Thesaurus” is a Greek word meaning “treasure”.
A Thesaurus is a collection of words, arranged according to their meanings, displaying a range of their different uses and interpretations.
The ice crystal side map developed for Terra Incognita, was used in the next project to hold a dialogue between myself and Tasmanian artist/educator Melissa Smith.
Roget’s Circular became an animated personal thesaurus that was later to be integrated with the Macquarie Library’s first electronic edition of their reference work. (Macmillan Publishing, 2001)
14.
Moving through a year and around the world, art works were made, and messages exchanged in words and pictures, of the things we valued, rediscovered and collected throughout our separate journeys: a tune remembered, a piece of advice, a recipe, a doll, a garden…
15.
Recognizing in the six Thesaurus categories a chance to arrange the collected material according to our own meanings, a personal thesaurus evolved.
16.
Artwork, animation, words and sounds, arranged themselves into categories of shared values: The Garden, Child, Landscape, Letter, Portrait, Still Life.
17.
A calendar was superimposed over the site map as a device for navigating through the collection over time.
18.
In January 1999 we exchanged some landscape perspectives.
Melissa drew the landscape view from her father-in-law’s window: the object of his contemplation reflecting an internal landscape.
19.
Here, I observe how Australian landscapes have been transformed into English landscapes, like the transformation scene paintings of Victorian pantomimes – one of the early forms of animation for the theatre.
20.
Looking at ways to animate other people’s responses to landscape began in 2002, through conversations with expeditioners, while working as an artist in Antarctica.
I had begun to see the landscape through their eyes, and was inspired to see more.
It was only after this work that the idea for the present project emerged.
21.
Drawing and animating are ways of getting to know a landscape from what you can discern.
I wanted to understand what I was seeing and experiencing so that I could draw and animate it from other perspectives.
in 42 days – an animated Antarctic journal (Roberts 2003), I integrated drawings, paintings, and objects made during and after the voyage, with words from a written journal.
The film reflects a growing understanding of the landscape, with each day signified by track data and visual and written texts.
Their is a turning point on day 35, on the return journey, where the word “sheet” becomes a dual reference to the ice sheets of Antarctica, and the bed sheets sliding against my body during a stormy night sea.
It was at about that point that I felt the only real connection to be made with the landscape was physical. If I could not go to Antarctica again myself, then I needed to learn more from the people who had walked there.
22.
Traveling south, not only does the landscape change, but the meanings of familiar words change.
Bernadette Hince has written a whole Dictionary (2000) of words, with meanings peculiar to Antarctica: calve, sastrugi, frazil, katabatic, moop…
Jack Ward, the expeditioner I met at the recent Sydney Nolan exhibition of Antarctic art (2007), was also a writer, and expressed in poetic form the inadequacy of plain English in Antarctica:
Utterly isolated here, as on another planet from what we see about us…
…and the silence is accentuated by the scene, and the scene intensifies the silence.
You feel estranged. The word lives for the first time, as soon as it is spoken.
A long while, almost a horse’s whinny comes from the ice and at times strangely like a birdcall. (Ward, 1955)
The landscape, it seems, is a force in its own right, with its own voice.
23.
The drawings of Fred Elliott, who had worked alongside Jack in Antarctica, reveal a similarly elemental response. His Antarctica in Black and White…
24.
An on-line Antarctic Thesaurus is being developed as a research tool for collecting visual responses to Antarctic landscape by people who have lived and worked there – Scientists, suport personnel, and artists.
Stephen Eastaugh is a present day Antarctic base worker.
He works there as an artist, and has worked there longer than anyone in that role primarily.
His is a visual language of wit and whimsy, using whatever materials is at hand. “Base art” is how he describes it, for its elemental form and materials.
His diptych, MOOP – Man out of phase, maps the disorientated mind at odds with the unfamiliar rhythms of dark and light in Antarctica. Stitched lines through surgical bandage take a line for a walk through this internal landscape.
25.
Links are being made between such landscape responses as these, and words from The Antarctic Dictionary (2000):
moop noun, Aust.
[Acronym for ‘man out of phase’]
Someone disorientated…etc.
26.
When thinking of what can be animated to reflect change in Antarctic landscape, some obvious things come to mind: Annual sea ice extent, glacial pathways and rates of retreat, patterns in wildlife proliferation, rates of ice berg calving from ice shelves, the changing light and colour over a year.
And then there are the changes experienced within the minds of expeditioners working there over long periods: changes in the internal landscapes of individuals. The written and visual language used in diaries, photographs and artworks provide clues for animation.
27.
The Datascape Topography of Simon Pockley, and the Landscape Animation of Hobart Hughes, are the research practices I use to animate what I learn from others.
As Hughes says, “Landscape animation involves time-lapse, stop motion and sequence animation…you could describe Koyaanisqatsi as landscape animation.†(Hughes, in con. 2007)
In deserts, the underlying landscape is laid bare, offering a non-homocentric view of land. Walking with bio-geologist Sam Mooney, Hughes came to see the landscape from the point of view of the land itself.
28.
“The topography of the datascape is shaped by the structural displays of a personal repository of texts, images and sounds…these texts are embedded in the datascape as cross-referenced hypertexts.†(Pockley, 2005)
An Antarctic topography that interconnects scientific and aesthetic responses to its landscape can be developed as an on-line repository of shared knowledge.
I am to reveal the changes observed and experienced in the external and internal landscapes of Antarctica.