I made the animation, Connectivity with drawings and words of four artists who have not been to Antarctica. I was interested to find out how other people imagined Antarctica to be, and if I could animate some connection between their imaginings and my remembered sense of it. Improvising with gestures, drawings and words were ways to engage in dialogue with other people to see what thoughts and feelings might arise. I wanted to know how an animation could be made to reflect some understandings arising from our dialogue. I wanted to make an animation that would capture some of the interactions that had occurred between people engaging with Antarctica, through imagination and memory.
Christine McMillan, John Smith, Kim Holten and Yoris Everearts are four Sydney based artists who had agreed to help me with my explorations. All had expressed a great interest in Antarctica, so I assumed they all knew something about it. When we met in a cold basement room with a hard concrete floor, Yoris immediately remarked how it was like being in Antarctica. We all agreed. So we know Antarctica is icy, cold and hard. What else? We sat in a circle and I gave each person a soft lead pencil, some sheets of white paper and small board to lean the paper on. I asked them to put down the words or pictures or both, that came immediately to mind when they thought about Antarctica. I asked them to do this quickly, without talking with each other or looking at each other’s work. This seemed to be difficult for some, as I watched them gaze off in the distance for a while before putting pencil to paper. Others began straight away. The words that emerged within three minutes were:
space, hostile, beauty, relationships, melting, lacking man made culture [Christine]; collage of impressions entirely through the media and 2nd or 3rd hand, desolation, strange feelings that arise when you are out of the mainstream [John]; timeless cellular memories, layers of history, parralels oral traditions, needs deeper understanding [Kim]; frozen memory, body, matter, purity – white [Yoris].
I recognised in all these words the Antarctica I had experienced. Specially interesting was John’s ‘collage of impressions entirely through the media and 2nd or 3rd hand’. So much of what I know about Antarctica comes to me that way. Antarctica is huge, and even if you have been there, you depend on the media to get an idea of its other landscapes you will most likely never visit. Or you can listen to what people will tell you about places they have known there. The Antarctic Penininsular, for example, is more in the media than East Antarctica, where I went. Australian expeditioners often call this West end the ‘pretty end’, in contrast to our more austere East ‘working end.’ Extending further north into warmer latitudes, the Antarctic peninsular contains more wildlife, and more rock protrudes through its melting ice. It is more colourful and alive in its physical expression of global warming. From the picture post card phots it looks beautiful and fragile. Satellite photos taken in recent years reveal to the world the dramatic collapse of the great Larson Ice Shelf. Methane escaping from other parts of the peninsular through rappidly melting ice is a phenomenon I can most clearly grasp through an artist’s visual response. Images of Andrea Juan’s Antarctic installation, Methane, can be seen on the artist’s website. They dramatise toxic human impact on our planet’s fragile atmosphere, with swathes of floating coloured tulle representing leaking chemicals. When I first saw this image I was moved to find out more about the science that inspired her work. I found the transcript of a conversation she had with the scientist, Rudolfo del Valle, as they traveled towards Antarctica. He explained to her that:
Through the increase of the greenhouse gas effect gases, we are causing the temperature to rise too much and just in the middle of a rising cycle – this might break the cycle. I believe this additive interference is already dangerous. Nature might be unable to restore the balance.
This is an example of the kind of dialogue an artist can engage in with an Antarctic scientist, that can shape the kind of dialogue she will have the Antarctic landscape. The artwork expresses the further dialogue she has between herself and her materials. And then there is the dialogue that happens between the finished art work and someone like me who responds to it.
I return to the cold basement room, and my dialogue with other artists.
I recognised in other words the artists wrote, much of my Antarctic experience. Many expressed what the landscape lacks. Christine wrote that Antarctica is ‘lacking man made culture.’ Her word ‘space’ suggests a lack of features we can see, features that we would expect to find in more familiar landscapes. I read this as meaning the external physical landscapes I have known, the physical places I have walked through, as well as the internal landscapes that I have shaped within my self through feeling responses to this external world. The word ‘hostile’ suggests an extreme lack of emotional warmth, and even anger, towards humans.
Some people grouped words in ways that suggest some contradictory feelings. I can read Christine’s words ‘melting’ and ‘relationships’, for example, to mean the opposite of her words ‘hostile’ and ‘lacking man made culture.’ ‘Warmth’ could reflect the intensely tender human connections that people can make with each other living in close proximity to each other in a dangerous place, and ‘melting’ could mean an emotional surrendering or release. I am aware as I write that I can find my own sense of Antarctica in other people’s responses. Such is the nature of dialogue, where meanings evolve through the listening and responding. Responding to these words I can feel my love for Antarctica with simultaneous fear.
Kim and Yoris wrote that Antarctica has ‘memories’ that are ‘cellular’ and ‘frozen’. Their words suggest that Antarctica is a sentient, feeling organism, where the ice knows its own past and ‘needs deeper understanding’. Their words accord with the Gaia theory of the Earth as a living being, the theory also reflected in the words of Antarctic scientist, Bill Burch:
…it’s the ancient air bubbles trapped in the ice which allow us to chart Gaia’s atmosphere going back millions of years.
Some of the artists drew images alongside their words. Some wrote their words like pictures. These offered visual clues about they knew the landscape. Christine’s marks in both her symbol and her writing reveal a layering of lines that echo Kim’s phrase, ‘layers of history.’ Both were drawing in response to an imagined landscape, and in their different ways arrived at a similar sense of it.
I am reflecting on how this animation came to be made, and have much more to write on that.
In the meantime, I made this Animation today. It reflects some internal contradictions I felt about Antarctica when I was there – feeling simultaneously connected and disconnected with its landscape, but more strongly feeling a part of the Earth as a whole. I am writing to try and sort out how that came to be, and what I mean when I say that. The animation is a bit too jumpy, but on the other hand that conveys the idea of jumping between states of mind, so I’ve kept it that way for now. I you play the animation over several cycles some interesting things happen with the sound, which is set to loop. Layers of discords occur that suggest the kind of aberration human action is having on the natural cycles of Earth motion. I like the basic rhythm of the piece, which has sets of 200, 40 and 20 frame cycles, reflecting the Milankovitch pattern. The dancing figure is me, doing Tai Chi.