Animation

 

 

These animations are works in progress. They are being made in response to the Antarctic landscape, through dialogues with expeditioners, scientists and other artists.

 

 

COMMENTS

General

Isn't the brain an amazing organ, being able to accomplish so much from assimilating completely abstract notions, and transforming them into sensate form.

Fred Elliott
Berwick, 10 December 2007

 

 

 

Navigate

LIsa

I'd say it's your best work to date. Nice repetition of the closely related forms and a good recycling of the cycles. It's long enough to enter into which makes a huge difference to the viewing reality.

JH
Sydney, 11 January 2008

 

 

 

Building Mawson, 1955

The drawing of Mawson 1955 was made more as a record than a picture, but the superimposed figure did set me thinking. It seemed to be uncertain about where to place the blocks it was moving, just as we were in placing the first huts at the beginning of 1954. Then, nothing was really known about drift patterns except that the drift-bearing winds would more than likely be from the plateau. This proved to be the case with roof-high drift on the northerly side of the buildings.

In 1955 the size of the station was doubled with the new huts being sited in places which were; suitable for their use, not likely to be covered in drift from another up-wind building, doorways free of drift, and, of course,on a site where the building could be easily erected by a mob of mainly amateurs. The buildings in the picture fulfilled these criteria.

Fred Elliott
Melbourne, 10 January 2008

 

 

 

Masson Range [1955-2007]

The pen (?) drawing [Masson Range] with the highlighter on it and the words/questions round the edges is brilliant. I love that it looks like someone - either the artist or someone else just looking at the picture - is trying to make sense of what they are seeing, trying in some way to map their thoughts about what they are observing. Strange how putting a text into a particular context can imbue it with meaning that doesn't (or at least didn't/might not) exist outside of that context.

I love context. Understanding context liberates. In my teaching whenever we talk about putting a text into our own personal context, the understanding the kids get of the way other contexts affect meaning is much more powerful because we are doing what we are talking about.

Kathryn Yeo
Dubai, 23 December 2007

 

 

 

Ice forming (Home page)

Your ice formation animation is interesting. For me it faded too quickly to really appreciate the conversion from liquid to solid. And I guess from my Science background, I would like the process to be seen to be starting from the surface of the liquid in conformity with the facts. The density of pure water peaks at 4degC, so as a pool cools below that, all convection ceases, leaving further cooling to take place from the surface exposed to the air, and that's why ice forms from the top - which is just as well for all aquatic life forms!

A trickier thing to envisage is the metamorphosis of snow to ice in Antarctica. I simply do not know the science of this. But it would make for beautiful animation as each snow crystal starts out different, and the ultimate ice block is an amorphous mass, giving off that magical blue-green hue from the passage of sunlight. I suspect the slight colour changes are related to the degree of compression, and of course the whole process is integral in our mapping of climate change, since it's the ancient air bubbles trapped in the ice which allow us to chart Gaia's atmosphere going back millions of years.

Bill Burch
Sydney, 29 November 2007

 

 

 

Ice sound

 

Iceberg

 

When frozen

Their shape is sharp

Jagged edges slicing.

Giant icebergs growing

In coldness of oceanic minds

Only tips emerge, the purity submerged

hollow jagged cathedrals of alabaster white

an ethereal blue entices lustre of buoyant mountains

 

Floating further from home, murmurs and temperature

hairline cracks, a spectre of majestic purity

fracturing and splintering, becoming

contextual representations.

Melting, deliquesce

Lost in lilac

 

 

Raw untamed

Thoughts contained

Within shapes, products

of the imagination, restricted

by the confines of language, words.

The true purity of unsubjected thought hidden.

Behind carefully deranged symbols and punctuation

Complete communication of pure thought is impossible.

 

The global warming of thoughts into language. Smoothing

Edges and creases into a homogenous disembodied

thought, now easily manipulated within the

confines of language. Single streams

of once pure thoughts, now

linear, unrecognisable.

 

 

A. A. Davies
Sydney, 2007