Artist Anne Brodie spent nearly three months in Antarctica.
Like Stephen Eastaugh, working on Australian Antarctic bases, Brodie worked with waste materials found at hand.
As she reports, on the British Antarctic Survey website:
The accessibility and abundance of transparent plastic seemed as much part of the base as the icebergs and sea ice, and prompted me to use it in small works around the base.
She entered into a kind of dialogue through such materials, inviting expeditioners to place items in glass bottles that represented their connections with Antarctica.
As for many artists who have worked in Antarctica, she does not regard her data collections methods as strictly scientific:
As the scientists were busy with their data collecting along with general community duties, I too was data collecting albeit with less rigorously scientific controlled parameters. Along with the ice core samples shipped back to Cambridge for analysis, with the amazing help and support of the British Antarctic Survey, I also brought a 90kg block of Antarctic ice back, which is currently being held in a BAS freezer. The questions ‘ Why? and ‘What are you going to do with it ?’ are important and have become integral to my next piece of work.
See previous Post, Artists interpret data.
Brodie describes a work-in-progress that she envisages as a metaphor for the Earth as a ‘functioning balanced system’:
…a hollow glass ‘chandelier’ installation, filled with light emitting bioluminescent bacteria. The chandelier is a living system that requires energy, gives off light which gradually fades and produces waste products; it will serve the role as a metaphor for the earth as a functioning balanced system, illustrating the usually hidden rate of western society’s energy demands and provoking thoughts about energy supply, depletion, and waste.