Terra Australis Nondum Cognita

I found out last week that I have been selected as the Friends of The Scott Polar Research Institute’s Artist in Residence for 2016 and this coming March, I will be joining the crew of HMS Protector on her journey south to the Antarctic. This is the most incredible opportunity and I am absolutely thrilled and grateful to The Friends, to SPRI, to the Royal Navy and in particular to Bonhams, the programmes very generous sponsor.

My project proposal, one that will evolve over the course of the following weeks and months, hinges on the use of science as a means of informing the creative process. Science and exploration are so tightly woven into the fabric of this incredible place and the hope is to develop works that unite both an intellectual pleasure - the joy that comes from learning and understanding - with the kind of imaginative pleasure derived from the free play of ideas and associations.

Antarctica is unlike any other place on earth. A vast white wilderness - isolated, windswept, shrouded in ice up to 5km thick in places and plunged into darkness for most of its long winter. Like moths to a flame, the lure for scientists and explorers has led to some of the greatest feats of human endurance and discovery, but also sadly to some of her most famous tragedies. If ever there was a landscape that conjures up Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime - the paradoxical fear of pain and death in the face of enchantment and awe, it must be here.

Humans only first set eyes on Antarctica in the 1840’s and for centuries it existed only as an idea, mapmakers referring to it romantically as Terra Australis Nondum Cognita, the ‘Unknown Southern Land’. As I start out on this adventure it seems only right to borrow the term for the title of my first blog post.

I do hope you will come keep me company along the way…