From 1st December 2006 to 5th February 2007 I was in Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey on the ‘Artists and writers Fellowship’.

I sailed South on The James Clark Ross from Stanley in the Falklands to Rothera on the Antarctic peninsular, arriving on 15th December. An amazing way to approach the continent – slowly, experiencing the gradual change in temperature through Drakes Passage and then Elephant island with tabular bergs looming out of the mist.

I chose to go to Rothera because I knew that from there I would be able to get deep into Antarctica and experience a landscape which is absolute, and which I could use as a kind of benchmark with which to compare and contrast other phenomena, both in the macrocosm and the microcosm.

Before going I said this: “It struck me recently that Antarctica is the place where wind is born. I applied to go because my instinct was to try to visit one of the most extreme places on the planet as a counterpoint to looking at extreme patterns of flow in the body. Recently someone drew my attention to the fact that in the Navajo tradition, wind is the force of the creator and the whorls on our fingertips are the traces of creation, as drawn by wind.”

My instinct was I think correct as in the beginning of January I was sent out to Sky Blu, a depot deep into Antarctica on the Ice cap. Here with Anne Brody my co artist we built an igloo, which for me was an inverted Cloud Chamber.

Although I made a few small interventions on the ice: Cloudigloo, Iceprint and Wind Vortex; a work made with a GPS taped to a skidoo and photographed from the adjoining Nunatak, my overall feeling was that this was an untouched and untouchable land. Anything made by man, however impermanent, was dwarfed by the absolute untouchableness of the place.

In fact all the ideas I arrived with evaporated rapidly as they were too impractical. Instead I had a deep experience of an extraordinary land. I climbed two mountains, got a co-pilot flight to the Ellsworth mountains at around 78 degrees, flew planes, experienced the endless nothingness flying over the ice caps, and went on to stay at the small hut at Fossil Bluff on the edge of the frozen George V1 Sound, with its turquoise melt pools.

Of course one of the predominant experiences of being in Antarctica is a social one. There are many remarkable people working for BAS and I was fortunate to spend time out on the ice with two glaciologists taking echo-recordings of the ice from the air and on sledges.

These echo drawing are visually and conceptually extraordinary images and they hold within them the history of the last 900,000 years of the Earth. It is my intention now to work with these scientists back in Cambridge and to produce a body of work from this collaboration. I will also use maps and satellite images collected daily together with wind and pressure maps of weather systems over the continent.

 For more images and details of my stay in Antarctica visit my web log