Glaciers are not made of ice. But rather, compressed snow.
This is one of the first things I learned after leaving Longyearbyen, Svalbard, to sail north to the Arctic Circle aboard the Antigua, a Dutch tall ship. This was a trip without destination, but not without purpose.
I spent the endless days, watching the sun loop across the sky, in a land of impossible scale living an obsession I’d only read about. It was an obsession steeped equal parts in discovery and solitude. It was here in this presumed nothingness that I realised how incompressible the edges of the world must have felt for those discovering it for the first time.
I used to love pouring over maps when I was young. I would stare endlessly at these lines and patterns, trying to glean meaning from them, as if between the lines I could find dense jungle, vast tundra or sweeping desert, learn new languages, dance and song. Like an anthology I couldn’t quite read, but filled with stories I couldn’t wait to live.
It’s no wonder I became a photographer, staring ardently through the lens, trying to distil life from a single frame.
But of course, that’s impossible. And thus, what we choose to capture becomes as much a part of our biographies as the landscape we inhabit: an experiential space - a felt and evocative landscape.
In the Arctic, I understood the Romantics search for the sublime, the Surrealist’s infatuation with the uncanny. There was a delirium in the day and an arrest in logic. The sky never set, but it did turn black over open water. The groundglared, cracked and froze in the same instance.
Those days sailing with the wind were strange. They felt both aimless and yet endlessly considered, debated and planned. Each afternoon, from the captain’s wheelhouse, I would watch as he traced the monitor, redrawing the fjords we had visited. “They’re not right.” He said once, pointing at the screen. He flipped through a booklet of his own hand drawn A4 maps filled with adjusted coastlines, erased islands and new glaciers.
Here, above the 78 parallel, technology came second to first hand knowledge. The landscape was changing faster than it could be updated and yet the maps I scrutinised as a child remained unchanged, frozen like a photograph, of out sync and out of frame. The climate is changing the maps, but they were also wrong to begin with it, drawn as much from geographies as from politics and economies.
"Habitable Climes" is a body of work that charts how we perceive place and the way we try to impose logic and measures on the world. There is something incredibly human in trying to understand, falling short, and trying again.
Because maps do not only chart the earth, but the stars as well. Drawing inspiration from the 19th century terrestrial and celestial 'Blue China Maps', I asked myself what presumptions I had had that since been upturned. This was the very idea of night and day. I wanted to create a work that reinterpreted these pieces through my experience in the Arctic, charting the midnight sun. But in doing so, I had to ask myself, what is its anthesis? "Polar Opposite", is taken from a desiccated lakebed in Nevada through multiple dust storms. Surrounded by earth, in a prehistoric lake, it felt both subterranean and alien.
It is an exhibition that responds to a history of human ingenuity and curiosity, an era of scientific innovation, mathematical prowess and cartographic evolution. It is a history of imposed borders, oversimplification and greed. It is a history of playful games of spinning globes and far off lands, of imagination and wanderlust. It is an exhibition of how we choose to see the world, its faults and wonder and their inherent co-existing contradictions.
How do we find our way? Can we reduce the world to a series of degrees and parallels? The idea of how we place ourselves in space can be answered a hundred difference ways. My heritage is not my nationality. I grew up on stories of people and places I’d never known but felt connected to. The places described are from memories. They don’t exist now as they did. Does that mean this connection is to a ghost, or just a language by which orientate ourselves?
"Impossible Measures", a series of 16 etchings, that looks at the obfuscation of direction through the photographing of navigational silhouettes. This obfuscation is from time, as knowledge is gained and lost repeatedly. Inspired by the Royal Geographical Society’s collection, these etchings feature artefacts such as Livingstone and Darwin’s pocket sextants, and Gertrude Bell’s theodolite.
These remarkable objects delineated the world. Aristotle first separated the world into 5 zones, called "Habitable Climes", from which this exhibition gains its name. These zones stratified the world, into frigid, temperate and torrid climates in which were and were not habitable. As time passes, zones were added and eventually became the parallels we know today.
There are far more latitudes today. The world has grown too. But the margins by where we deem habitable is a variable that cannot be ignored. This a latitude as well, one which we afford ourselves.
As an artist-photographer and printmaker, I am fascinated by the evolving, shifting perspectives found within the intersecting narratives of climate, histories, and how print and photography hold an inherent place within that history, its dissemination and democratisation.
The exhibition ends with "View Finding", a series of 'cartes des visites', that culminates in how expeditions brought back and communicated the places they had been to.
I wanted something that shifted from collecting or owning the world – something very colonial, to something that was “collectible,” and therefore personal.
These works cycle through many early photographic processes. Nearly a century of photographic processes helps the viewer walk through time as well as space. It also shows the democratisation of photography itself. This idea that cameras were used for expeditions, governments and those who could afford it, to being in every household. I wanted this transition to come across in the collection as the works shift through the different climes, as well as different eras of view finding and image capturing.
I wonder about these perspectives and how we frame the world. What has changed? Is it because we can all take images? Is it time itself that creates this distinction? Or simply who is behind the lens?
