M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

and leave land behind.
This region of the Barents Sea is known to the
Norwegians as the Devils Dance Floor. The sound of the
ship, the ropes and tackle on deck, are transmitted to the
interior of the ship by the steel masts. Every thing is
moving, the crockery rattles, the bell in the cabin
occasionally rings.
On deck the cold wind bites and howls through
the rigging, the sea is a grey green, the waves whitetopped.
The light is startling. Here, unlike being below,
you see the waves and anticipate the movement. I like it
here. The crew say it is better to be on deck and accept
the sea rather than remain in a cabin and try to make the
four walls a substitute for land.
I go back to the cabin and set up my recording
equipment for the first time and, wearing it like a suit,
return to the deck and begin recording the sounds of the
ship. Some time later there is shouting. Everyone swarms
on deck. Whales! Where? There! Dark shapes appear,
minke and humpback. A chaos of cameras click and
whirr. I join in and dangle a hydrophone over the side. I
put on headphones and hear sea and the ship’s engine
but nothing else. No whales.
May 28 th
Land on the horizon: a small point that grows over the
hours into Bear Island. The four hundred metre cliffs
dark and forbidding, the tops hidden in cloud. This is my
first sighting of pack ice, a white belt of myriad shapes in
continuous movement.
Again a shout; Bear! I strain my vision into the
pack ice. One of the crew says ‘Don’t look for white look
for yellow’. I adjust my colour recognition to yellow and
scan again and again, and see a tiny faint yellow
movement. Apparently bears appear yellow at a distance
and become increasingly white and dangerous merging
with the ice as they move towards you. It’s a young polar
bear, desperately chasing sea birds. Eventually it swims
out to the ship, lifts its head from the water, and, sniffing
the freezing air, stares at us. Perhaps it’s never seen or
smelt a ship or a human before? This is the characteristic
behaviour of a curious bear, they are, however,
notoriously, unpredictable. If a bear blows through its
nostrils and snaps its teeth together, you are in a
dangerous situation, one which I resolve never to get
into even though it might make an interesting recording.
May 30 th
We arrive in Hornsund, Spitsbergen. Everyone
of us is speechless at the black mountains, the white
snow and blue ice. I lower the hydrophone over the
ship’s side and listen. This is unbelievable. I hear
descending notes glissading gracefully, ascending slightly
then falling. It’s a seal. It’s joined by another, whose voice
follows then curves round the first, weaving a beautiful
tapestry. But looking out, there are no signs of seals.
Sound travels more efficiently through water and they
could be twenty miles away.
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May 31 st
Dr. Ko De Kort, our guide, takes us ashore. Our aim is to
record a Kittiwake colony on a 1.000 metre high cliff. We
will climb a scree slope to get as close as possible to the
birds. The slope seems to be at a 30-degree angle. Half
way up we pause and I turn to look down and see the
tiny ship dwarfed by the landscape. For the first time I
feel real fear. We continue up the slope but the scree
slides out from beneath our feet and we have to start to
crawl. Dr Ko says that the ice holding the scree together
is far more melted than he had anticipated for this time
of the year. This is global warming. We crawl a little
further and stop. We are trapped on the slope. I find
myself talking to my recording equipment for comfort. I
concentrate on recording the kittiwakes to distract me
from panicking and falling down the slope. I am grateful
when we achieve the descent. I see a whale in the sea.
Dr Ko looks through binoculars: “No its not a whale, it’s
a rock, but it’s just as beautiful”. I learned a lot from this.
Later we go ashore to a Polish research station and one
of the scientists tells how, in the last winter when it was
dark for all twenty four hours of the day, he heard an
unfamiliar rasping sound. He followed it through the
station until he found it was coming from one of the
storerooms. He entered and switched on the light - the
sound came from the window, which was frozen. A black
slug-like shape was moving over it again and again: it was
a polar bear licking the window from the outside.
5 th June
We sail to a coastline and anchor. Walrus swim around
the ship. I lower the hydrophone into the water and hear
an extraordinary sound, like nails being hammered into
wood. It is the walrus clicking their teeth together. Later I
fix wind flutes to the ship. In the morning I find they have
been covered over. The crew tell me that they did it; the
flutes seemed to make the persistent wind blow more
wildly.
London
From these fragments of experience I began to assemble
thoughts of work. What struck me was that although the
journey was extraordinary, it was the return that really
affected me. I felt a deep sense of sadness and
depression as we left that world of remote nature and
returned to the source of the changing climate - the
industrial human world. What we were trying to do was
to confront not the Arctic but ourselves. The Arctic had
made me more aware of my senses and I began to
perceive this world of machines to be as alien and
remote as the frozen wilderness we had just left.
I created my first work for Cape Farewell’s
temporary exhibition, Ice Garden, that took place outside
the Bodlean Library,Oxford. 2006. I was inspired by the
visible layers or strata of debris that I had seen in the
glaciers that we had sailed past. I had the image of layers
of stones trapped in ice, falling as the ice melted. Was it
possible to make an artificial glacier? I collaborated with
Ice sculptor Duncan Hamilton. Duncan said it would be
possible to make it over a few