Editor's Note: We are pleased to announce that we are preparing to run a series of interviews of scientists and researchers in Antarctica. Just to get you 'warmed up' to the region, today we introduce an art-based approach to climate change, examining the work of photographer Joyce Campbell. Feel free to let us know if you have sustainable art you'd like to feature on Celsias. An excerpt from an essay on photographers in the Antarctic, entitled ‘Claims on Beauty’ by Sophie Jerram, in the New Zealand Journal of Photography 065, 2007
Pressure Ridge, Scott Base, Antarctica, 2006
 Ice Ghoul Antarctica, 2006 |
Artist: Joyce Campbell One of the most frightening aspects of climate change or ‘global warming’ as it is less euphemistically called, is the complex and uncontrollable nature of it. Having watched it emerge out of industrial society like an amorphous Frankenstein, we now recognise the signs of the monster’s self-propulsion and find that we have lost the thermostat’s remote control. Campbell uses an Victorian Gothic aesthetic to exploit our fears that nature may indeed have some grand plan – that is, to shake us off the planet now that we have proven ourselves unworthy of it. She finds ghouls faces and inhospitable voids in the vulvic crevasses and makes long, vast knee-trembling drops of the work. Her intention in full scale exhibition display is to induce a sense of human insignificance. She describes her approach to photographing the immensity of Antarctica:
Antarctica is huge, but we are making it smaller by accident. While efforts at colonizing Antarctica have barely dented its surface, our collective addiction to fossil fuels, acting incrementally and from afar has gnawed deeply into the ice structures that cover the continent. The effect is antiheroic, grimy, disintegrative and potentially cataclysmic. It’s hard to know how to make art in a place that matters that much. It can seem like a trivial and cosmetic thing to be doing. But our survival as a species requires a collective cultural response and the work of climate scientists requires translation, so I suppose I still have some work to do. In approaching Antarctica, I knew I needed to draw my audience into the physicality of that very strange, distant and otherworldly place through photography. But photographing Antarctica poses particular problems beyond the bitter cold and its effects. It is extraordinarily picturesque, its epic grandeur is the stuff of calendars and it has been photographed to death. Like any idealized subject, we know it both too well and not at all. Something savage, atavistic and genuinely terrifying lies behind that idealized landscape.
Barne Glacier, Antarctica, 2006
20th Century science fiction is filled with the discovery or inhabitation of the moon, Mars and other galaxies. Many have suggested escaping this planet in search of a better life. We are oddly familiar, then with the fictional views of the moon depicted in Star Trek. In Last Light, Campbell has depicted Antarctica as this moonscape; nightmarish, devoid of life. If it were the moon, it is a brave explorer who could dream of making a new life here in this bleak space. What torrid experience could make leaving our fertile plains for this eerie scene appear attractive?
 Pressure Ridges, Scott Base, Antarctica 2006 |
Looking at Campbell’s images has reminded me of the curse Medusa. By looking at the Greek goddess, the onlooker was turned to stone. Campbell writes of her own petrification:
The sublime image of nature is a terrifying one. When we lean over the railing and peer into the raging cataract below we are confronted by the power and simultaneously by our own insignificance, our mortality. What is terribly fascinating about Antarctica is that it is an indicator of our collective mortality as a species, perhaps even as a biosphere.
