At Sydney’s Mitchell Library I make some pencil studies of Fred Elliott’s pen and ink drawings of MacRobertson Land, Antarctica. Here is my response to his rendition of David Range as he saw it in 1955. It takes me back to the day I climbed Mount Henderson in 2002, near this landscape, south of Mawson.
Fred’s drawings are highly detailed, revealing his understanding of the physics of the landscape as much as his aesthetic response. They really are unique in this way.
I am reading the journal he kept while walking and climbing through this landscape.
Jack Ward journeyed with Fred through this place. I am reading both their diaries. Jack used the tent as a metaphor to describe the nunatak protruding unexpectedly from the vast ice dome, their colour and shapes “comical” in their mundane familiarity.
Kathryn Yusoff wrote, in reviewing a painted Antarctic contemporary landscape, that “Ultimately, the tent marks the persistence and fragility of human culture at its edges.” (Exhibition review, Margaret Elliott, Tented spaces, Tate Electronics Art Gallery, 14 November 2003- 28 March 2004)
The same image may be used, but for a different metaphorical purpose.
Times have changed since 1955. Today’s Antarctic observers live in a world of dramatic climate change, or as Yusoff more accurately describes it, climatic “disaster”.
“Culture at its edges” is a preoccupation of Yusoff’s I recognise from her thesis, Arresting Vision: a geographical theory of Antarctic light (Ph.D ., London, Royal Holloway, 2004)
Edges, margins and limits hold her interest, as they do for many who have known or imagined Antarctica. She describes Antarctica as “a site at the margin of terrestrial systems”, that “disrupts the usual practices of visual representation.” Part of her research was to examine the “limits of visibility”.
Antarctica is also where you can find the limits of yourself.
Sophie McIntyre writes, in her catalogue introduction to the exhibition Breaking ice: re-visioning Antarctica, (2005) “Antarctica is a space onto which we project ourselves – our hopes, fears and desires. It is pure, pale and foreign.” Yet how do we project ourselves when we describe a landscape which so re-defines our very selves?
Experiencing, imagining and theorizing Antarctic landscape calls for a new language.
When asked to describe what knowledge my own research might contribute to visualising Antarctic landscape, I am often prone to speechlessness. I find myself at the edge of language itself. No wonder then that I grapple with comprehending language evoked by others attempting to describe it, or worse still, attempting to ascribe it meaning.Finding form to describe the physical and psychological relationship we find with land is the stuff of arts. Any words we might use will be read as poetry. We may compose a personal language, drawing from familiar lexicons. But a shared language of Antarctica is a concept at the edge of my understanding. Antarctica is a different landscape to everyone. The stations and bases are all temporary. Every party residing there develops its own language briefly, and then forgets it on there return to the so-called real world. There is no common culture in Antarctica, no shared systems of beliefs and practices. No shared art, and no share language. Only, perhaps, the odd strange word.