Wispering walls and crystals

Over the last three days I worked with Christine McMillan in the lush Mount Tomah Gardens, mounting her installation, Gathering.

She showed me the garden’s Whispering Wall:

Photo: Christine McMillan

Part of Christine’s preparation for this project involved digitally drawing over photographs she had taken of specific garden sites. These drawings became our guides for installing the works.

Botanical artist, Marion Wesmacott, was with us to render these virtual installations physically.

We all stayed in the house of the resident Director/botanists Jan Allen and Rob Smith, and had to work very quickly, between the misty showers of rain. Preparation wall vital!

Marion had researched and illustrated many of the garden’s specimens, working alongside botanists and sometimes geologists. She showed me a drawing she made for part of the visual interpretation of the Gondwana garden. It is the only drawing she is aware of that shows the motion of Australia from Antarctica over geological time in cross-section. Both she and Rob have given their permission for me to animate the drawing, which I will undertake with Marion’s guidance.

A pair of Whispering Walls, inward-curving towards the centre of a formal garden, are a mystery, even to the Directors and curators. If two people stand, each facing a wall and speak, they can hear each other’s words. We imagine them as ancient ways for telling secrets – for passing on secret knowledge anonymously. Christine has heard of others that are ancient, in other places in the world.

The Whispering Walls immediately suggested to us a dialogue, between Antarctic and Australian landscape changes.

Between the two smooth concave walls, sounds and animations can be projected.

That evening over dinner, the idea gelled as a touring installation (to other Whispering Walls), with cable connections to other gardens on other continents, including Antarctica.

I am reminded of the visual metaphors that come from gardens, to describe the nature of Antarctica:

“thin large waterlily leaves of ice” (Ward, 3rd March 1955) and “These clear days begin like the unfolding of a shadowed orchid.” (14th August, 1955)…and more

To the human mind, Antarctica’s elemental landscape can reflect the lush diversity of his sensory experience.

I found a book in Jan and Rob’s collection referring to a visual thesaurus of natural objects, by Amsterdam apothecary Albert Seba (1665-1736) in 1734. A drawing he made of a specimen Hydra, or seven-headed serpent, caught the eye of Linaeus (1707-1778). The specimen, not the drawing, Linnaeus discovered, was a hoax. It had the feet of a weasel!

The book: Wilfred Blunt, The Complete Naturalist – a life of Linnaeus, 2001

It would be interesting to see how Seba classified his images, as his thesaurus was conceived before Linaeus established the standard system for the of classification of plant and animals, still in use today.

Another interesting example of classification of natural phenomena is The Cloudspotter’s Guide – by Gavin Pretor-Pinney – an official publication of the Cloud Appreciation Society www.cloudappreciationsociety.org 2007:

Clouds are classified according to a Latin ‘Linnaean’ system (similar to the one used for plants and animals), which is based on their heights and appearance…

I find a long and detailed explanation for the different shapes of ice crystals – enough to animate a world of diverse, eccentric forms. The cold dry conditions of Antarctica, I can now see, would favour elegant, symmetrical forms:

The speed at which a cloud’s crystals grow depends on the temperature and humidity of the surrounding air, and appears to be the crucial factor in determining their shape – the faster they grow, the more complex and intricate their forms.

As anyone in fashion knows, the secret of style is in combinations. As crystals fall through very different regions of air, they can take on combined forms, such as plates, columns or stellar dendrites with additional dendrite branches sprouting from them at strange angles.

When ice finds its way to the ground and falls as snow, it will have passed through many different temperatures and humidities, on the way down, and will frequently have played its part in several cloud formations as it did so. No wonder then, that snow is often in the form of a tangle of individual crystals generally referred to as ‘snowflakes’.

The shapes of crystals becomes less regular as they fall through clouds of liquid droplets, which tend to freeze on to them as ‘rime’, roughening their their sides or making them fur up, like the element of a kettle. It is more of a street look, compared with the timeless haut couture of elevated, pure crystals.

Pretor-Pinney, 2007; 224-5

Classifying and categorizing are ways of organising data. Mapping requires visual representation of the content.

Both Linnaeus and Pretor-Pinney illustrate their items – as specimens collected and drawn.

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“Subtle changes are enough to make a difference,” says Kanto, who is writing her doctoral thesis on the glacio-chemical properties of snow. For example, wet snow reflects rays back into space considerably less than dry snow.

Kanto has gathered her research data from Antarctica. The research questions in her dissertation have been affected by the large role Antarctica plays in the global climate. “I am studying the physical and chemical characteristics of surface snow, which determine its reflective capacity,” Kanto explains. “In practice this means not only working in front of the computer but also field measurements on the conductivity and density of snow, determining the size and shape of snow crystals, annual snowfall, as well as comparing my observations to optical measurements and satellite remote sensing carried out by other scientists.”

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“The increase of greenhouse gasses became evident through a drilling made at Russia’s Vostok station, which penetrated three kilometres, reaching 420,000-year-old ice,” Kanto says.

By reaching in to the ancient past, polar researchers can also see the future. In the past few decades, the average temperature in the Arctic has risen at almost double the rate of the rest of the world. Some of the phenomena taking place in the Arctic region can be read as predictions of what awaits the other continents.

The speed of the warming is due to both the weakening of the reflective capacity of the snow and ice cover and the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. Polar caps are covered by a thinner layer of air than the rest of the planet, and ozone depletion has concentrated in these areas.

University of Helsinki Quarterly, Spring 2005

Eija Kanto is a snow researcher from the Division of Geophysics on the Kumpula Campus.