Imaging Antarctica : responses from contemporary artists.

• Main Author: Litten, Harriet
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: University of Canterbury 2019
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10092/100080; https://doi.org/10.26021/4063

Antarctica has been represented by countless different agents for a multitude of reasons, even before its official discovery in the eighteenth century. Whether in attempts to understand and locate an imagined southern continent, support and retell Heroic era expeditions, encapsulate twentieth-century geopolitics or twenty-first-century scientific research and climate change action, Antarctica has become a site upon which a huge range of themes can be explored. Not only has media such as artworks, maps, and literature been employed since the 1500s to proliferate specific narratives about Antarctica, but these representations have been, and continue to be the predominant way in which many people come into contact with this place. The sheer extremity and isolation of Antarctica means that physically visiting is extremely rare, and therefore, the images that are presented to the world become the most common mode of encountering the place. Focusing on works by artists Anna McKee, Chris Drury, Xavier Cortada, Gabby O’Connor, Adele Jackson, Anne Noble, Alexis Rockman, Joyce Campbell, Connie Samaras, Ronnie van Hout and Pierre Huyghe, this thesis examines some of the ways in which these contemporary artists have responded to scientific, tourism-related and science- fiction imaginings of Antarctica. In turn these artists, amongst others, work to interrogate modes of Antarctic representation and the wider implications that these images can have.