PISSING IN THE WIND

The landscape of the Interior of Antarctica is absolute. It is so all encompassing and beautiful it can reduce you to tears. The two weeks I spent here were exhausting both physically and mentally, often dealing with quite difficult personalities in stressful circumstances. However, whenever I think back to that time, my heart misses a beat and tears come to my eyes because the landscape itself was so much bigger and deeper than the insane preoccupations of us human beings.

On my first evening at Sky Blu, standing on the top of Lanzarotti Nunatac, looking out on that ethereal space it was very clear to me this was an untouched and untouchable land. Both empty and full at the same time; complete in itself. Any mark made by man is like pissing in the wind - irrelevant and gone in the next moment. Even the collective idiocy of the industrialised world, which seems to be producing widespread glacial retreat on the ice-shelves and the Antarctic Peninsula, will in the history of 900,000 years of the build-up of the interior ice cap, no doubt be just a minor blip along with all the other catastrophical blips recorded among the layers of ice during those hundreds of thousands of years.

When I first applied to come to Antarctica with BAS, my instinct was that I needed to experience one of the most extreme places on Earth, so it could act as a kind of bench mark of the macrocosm with which I could compare and link my findings in the microcosm: flow patterns and processes in the body. Having been here, I feel that instinct was right. I needed this experience to enter my very bones; to act as a baseline for further research.

The Antarctic ice cap is the place where global climate is born. It also stores within its emptiness the history of the last 900,000 years of the planet. The echo-recordings of the ice cap which scientists out in the field are making by flying straight lines low over the ice cap with echo-sounding equipment attached to the undersides of the wings, give long computer drawings which are similar to echocardiogram readings of our hearts. If you know what to look for, an echocardiogram can give doctors the health history of a patient. in the same way glaciologists are trying to find ways of reading these echrecorded drawings to give us an insight into the history of the planet. These drawings are like a heartbeat of the Earth and ultimately that is where my interest as an artist lies. As yet I only have a vague idea as to what form any works will take. I have got to know a number of these scientists personally and some have expressed an interest in working with me on ways to make these drawings visible and intelligible. That is my plan for the future.

In the mean time, as a way of being in this place I have made marks in the snow and ice. Visible for at most a day. Like pissing in the wind.



'Touching Ice', a fingerprint made by brushing snow off the blue ice with a dustpan and brush.



'Ice Line', a blue ice runway made by people over the last decade or so and renewed by myself and five others from 15th - 17th January 2007.






'Wind Vortex', A drawing made by skidoo on fresh snow and photographed from the adjoining Nunatak

The snow never settles here for long because of the wind vortices created by the effect of the Nunatacs on the prevailing northerly winds. Hence there is permanent blue ice here at Sky Blu, even the surface of which could be many centuries old and which allows for an ice runway. I Had an idea to make a simple line drawing of the wind. Back at Rothera, Crispin helped me to put the drawing onto a GPS matching the co-ordinates of the map. In theory I should have been able to lash the GPS to the handlebars of the Skidoo, drive to the end of the runway under Lanzarotti Nunatac, and then pick up the arrow on the GPS screen and follow it around the drawing.
However it needed:
1) A fresh fall of snow.
2) No wind.
3) No flights as all the skidoos would be in use.
4) A fine afternoon with sun, so that the work would show up enough to be photographed.

By a miracle all of this came together on 14th January. So I headed for the end of the runway with Skidoo, cameras, GPS, warm clothing and crampons. The first spiral began to fit nicely under Lanzarotti, however there must have been an 80 m. discrepency in the map as the larger spiral began to head up the hill towards the crevassed area, so from there on I had to ad-lib it by eye making it smaller than intended. I then parked the skidoo back down the runway and walked into the drawing, then up onto the ice slopes of the Nunataks where I photographed the work.
The following day there was a wind blowing and Nico flew in. When he landed he asked who had made the drawing and offered to photograph it on his way out from the air. Half an hour later he was airborne, but the drawing had gone with the wind.