Continuous Penguin Recorder #01 [2006]
Found materials: silk zooplankton mesh, fax rolls, steel, paper, wood, ink

360 X 295 X 120 mm
Words composed with Karin Beaumont
Signed and dated (verso)
Exhibitions: Nov. 2006, Mura Clay Gallery, Newtown, Sydney
LR collection, Sydney

Words

I was cleaning my studio one day,

moving some stuff around,

when I began to look at some thing I had put together earlier

with new eyes: a length of varnished wood with a fax roll core

at each end with handles welded on for winding.

I'd used it as a tool when teaching English.

Students were given a length of paper the width of the rollers

and asked to make a drawing

to represent the action of a chapter of a novel.

Joined together, and attached either end to the rollers,

we wound the handles to read the whole book in picture form.

My partner Ken was wearing a T-shirt that day which caught my eye.

Printed with actual penguin feet,

it reminded me of tracks I'd seen in the snow at Davis,

in the summer of 2002.

A scientist on Macquarie Island had made the T-shirt

when he was wintering there in 1995.

Thinking about treadmills,

and the dedicated tasks of expeditioners,
I began printing the penguin feet onto sheets of paper,
like messages from the South.

Karin Beaumont, a marine BIOLOGIST

staying with us at this time

had made five trips to Antarctica studying zooplankton.

She pointed out that my device

looked a bit like a CPR: Continuous Plankton Recorder.

These things trawl rolls of strong silk mesh through Antarctic waters,

collecting zooplankton,

to track their distribution and ABUNDANCE.

Zooplankton are INDISTINGUISHABLE to the naked eye.

Could this be a Continuous Penguin Recorder?

With silk mesh offcuts gathered from my voyage
I set to work.

I thought about the daily toil of penguins,

and all Antarctic creatures, in their struggle to survive,

and the treadmill of all lives,

the gathering of data in Antarctica,
continuous since modern man arrived.

The original CPR was developed by Alister Hardy in the 1920's

and has been used since those days

to track these TINY but CRITICAL little beasties

in the marine food chain,

on which penguins and people depend.

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