Warming to Cooling
[2007-10-14]

animation: Lisa Roberts
Sydney 2007

drawings: Christine McMillan
Kandos, Australia, 2007

sound:
Jack Colwell
Sydney, 2007

Drawings were made
to reflect the ice:
straight lines forming,
curved lines melting.
As spaces between lines of ice are warming
all oceans of the world expand.

THE PROCESS:

A movement score is introduced,
of water freezing and melting
through cycles of temperature change:

Cooling water molecules slow down,
move apart from each other,
and join together to float as ice.

Warming water molecules speed up
and move closer each other,
flowing rapidly in curving pathways,
melting the remaining ice.

Yoris Everaerts reads:

The cold transparent blue
of the ice plateau
has become a softer
blue opalescence.

Clefts and hollows
in the ice
have lost the glowing
almost radiant blueness
and become dark shadows.

Jack Ward
Mawson diary
2 April 1955

Christine moves and then draws
to the sounds of the words,
and writes her own reflection:

cold stiller
angular inside
yet hollows rounded as voice
draw with body
see far the plateau
sun changes
cold transparent blue
soft opalescence
lost radiance
colder stiller
Dickson

I scan Christine's drawings
from the first score,
and fracture the lines, like ice.
I fade them through each other
in a movement cycle,
like the endless rubbing
of ice against ice.

Jack Colwell fill a glass with water,
and records the sound of fingers
rubbing round the rim.
He builds a rhythmic structure
- a cycle of sound -
like ice squeaking
against ice.