I write lines of words to accompany line drawings and gestures: Antarctic Encounters
[Finale]
Oceans warm, water expands. Sea levels rise. Ice falls through gusts of wind: thoughts of Antarctica.
[Circumpolar]
Antarctica is a place of extremes, contrasts, and contradictions.
[Self contained]
People are self-contained and move from place to place.
[Drift]
The wind clutches your breath away and snow streams into your mouth.
[Hearing silence]
The wind blows all the time. But now and again it stops.
[Estranged]
You feel the word lives for the first time, estranged as soon as it is spoken.
[Oil track]
Bitumen beneath fast cars conceals Gondwanan fossils.
[Warming to cooling ice]
Earth history is archived in cold ice.
[Sea levels]
Oceans warm.
[Diatom]
Diatoms die. Their skeletons sink. Layer upon layer they sequester carbon dioxide. There is more CO2 in the air than they can deal with.
[Sea butterfly]
Sea butterflies cannot escape the hazard of the acids.
[Life of an iceberg]
Melting glaciers pour into the burdened sea.
[Ice sound]
Sounds like bird calls come from the ice.
[Mountain climb]
Rock evokes knowledge of tremendous forces.
[Mountain dance]
A mountain may not be a solid thing. It may be a body of cells; a mass of communicating dots.
[Building Mawson]
Glaciers scraped smooth the rock that plays host to Mawson station.
[Tsunami]
Antarctica registers changes in the world.
[Navigate]
I let myself go and imagine myself a creature of the sea.
[Mental substance]
Sounds of Antarctica converge in a city.
[Ancient mariners]
Always: landscape electric with human desire and oceanic need to survive.
[Amoeba]
Microscopic dancers balance elemental forces.
[Bubbles in the ice]
Chemistry of ancient air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice cores has been measured.
[CO2]
The concentration of carbon dioxide is now higher than at any other time in the last 850,000 years.
[Old brain]
Len Lye had this concept of the Old Brain: trapped in the core of our minds are ancient remnants of knowledge.
[Cycles of change]
I am glad you are seeing the beauty in the scientific data.
[Trace forms]
Lines of motion reflect the rhythms of the Milankovitch cycles: eccentric orbit of Earth around sun; oblique tilt of Earth on its axis; precessional wobble around it.
[Connectivity]
Cellular memories, connectedness, unison, fusion …
[Sailing girl]
‘There’s something about this little figure that reminds me of Antarctica.’
Yes, isn’t she lovely, sailing along there.’
‘She could be me,’ we said, from other sides of the world.
[Unnamed life forms]
Coiling lines record my motion through this world.
[Ice cry]
A long whine comes from the ice.
[Moving sense]
I seek balance.
[Value?]
But there is humour too.
[Wind gathering]
The cross is the central core of our human form.
[Turning cycle]
“Earth-Mother” is becoming an “Earth-Child” in our collective conscience.
[Beset]
What happens when our central core is thrown out of kilter?
[We drift]
We drift towards things we cannot posses.
[Detachment]
What if Antarctica was in your mind?
[Nothingness]
It’s all, it’s all just so simple …
[Krill watching]
with some sort of feel for it.
[How do krill grow?]
Once upon a time …
[Erebus voices]
we broke apart.
[Water energy]
Yet we are here …
[Bottom water]
and we are whole.