Touched by place

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Christine McMillan, Dangar Gorge (Australia) , February 2007

How the human mind transforms space into place, or land into landscape, is the line of inquiry that I have been following… The process is most easily traced when watching the mind at work in large, unfamiliar, and relatively empty environments, where we often have difficulty understanding our personal scale in space and time, versus the temperate forests and savanna where we primarily evolved as a species, or in cities that we have constructed to fit our needs. Deserts are among the emptiest spaces on land encountered by humans, and the Antarctic is the largest and most extreme desert on Earth.

(Fox, W., 2007; xiii)

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How the people who have worked in Antarctica perceived that landscape, and how animation can be used to reveal their different perspectives, is my line of inquiry. I will be focusing specifically on the journeys of two expeditioners who worked together for over a year at Mawson station, in Australian Antarctic territory, in 1955. They are sharing with me their visual and written responses, which reveal changes in their internal and external sense of Antarctica over that time. By way of an historic comparison, I am also looking more generally at visual representations of Antarctica made by the people who have worked there in recent times.

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Sharing a moment in the Australian bush, with a group of artists and arts educators, was a significant moment in my research journey. They shared their different perceptions about that place.

In February this year, I walked with a small group of artists through Dangar Gorge (NSW, Australia). We had come from different parts of Australia, and the world, to attend a conference in Art Education. For those from other countries, Australia seemed an alien landscape, and the metaphors used to describe it reflect that perception, drawn as they were from more familiar landscapes. For example, our English companion Sue wrote, “The smell was strange: dampness on foreign land…there was an unspoken knowing between us. The silence was parted by a diving swallow (if indeed that is what it was… I tried to assimilate the new experiences into homeland concepts).”
The written and visual metaphors we use to respond to a place reveal much about what we are reading into the land.

We each read into the land a ‘landscape’, each shaped differently through images and words.

Although our written and visual language varied, we all expressed a strong connection to that place and our time together there.

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Posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007