International Artists Fellowships

My working practice concerns notions of impermanence, transition and depletion, particularly in relation to manufacturing and object ownership; it concentrates on the value attached to the making process and the marks left behind.

Through the mediums of hot glass, film, sound and photography it was my intention to look at the Antarctic as a dynamic, ever moving part of a fragile balanced system, showing up the mark making 'thumbprint' created by western industrialization, and human activity. I work with glass in a very minimalist way that just involves concentrating on movement and the momentary-ness of points of time in the glass making process. Likewise, the Antarctic is continually shifting; nothing stays the same from one day to the next, and I loved the way that fitted in with my work.

Helping with the general recycling at the main British Antarctic base, Rothera, made me more aware of the scale of energy input/output of the actual Antarctic base which is home to approx 90 scientists and support staff in the short summer period. 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.

I took materials and constructed a glass furnace at Rothera, melted down waste glass bottles from the base and made new temporary work incorporating the newly recycled glass threads and ice. The glass was eventually returned back to the general recycling of the base waste, a brief artistic interlude in its journey.

Being in the Antarctic was never going to be about just fulfilling a project brief. My experience of the Antarctic was a gentle unraveling and the beginnings of a gradual understanding of the complexity and contradictions of the environment. Human beings are very much not meant to be there, and I think my role as artist allowed me to explore the relationship between this unique environment and the human responses to it. The human interface became a way of accessing the overwhelming sensory overload that constitutes the Antarctic.

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.

Along with working more on moving images, my current work is concentrating on the successful completion of 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.

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