Glacial

Since 2008 when I journeyed to Antarctica as an Arts Fellow of the Australian Antarctic Division, I have been exploring ways of representing the deep time embodied in that landscape. Out there, you have a constant awareness of movement and time. Some of it is so slow - gigantic ice sheets flow towards the sea at indiscernible rates - yet you can also watch seawater become ice in a matter of hours, or weather fronts moving across the horizon that rapidly alter the environment. The landscape is defined by this ever-creeping whiteness.

Initially I made drawings. I later experimented with short animations that functioned as time-lapse drawings; a single drawing, repeatedly reworked and re-photographed, frame-by-frame.

Remembering folding an iceberg out of pristine white paper during my voyage south, I began to construct stop-motion animations out of crumpled sheets of paper. These simple forms evoked the juddering lateral movement of ice and led to the 1600 frames of Glacial.

The work is a fast-forwarding of time that seeks to make visible the otherwise imperceptible.