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The big picture: baby it's cold outside
Conrad Astley10/ 2/2006
It's been called the last wilderness left on Earth, and in an age of budget travel to previously undreamt-of desinations, it is one of the few places that is still almost impossible to reach. Conrad Astley spoke to an artist whose work in Antarctica is being put on display.
WHILE some landscape painters may favour the rolling hills of
Derbyshire, or the dramatic cliffs of Cornwall, John Kelly had
other ideas about where he would find inspiration.
The Brighton-based artist flew to the Falkland Islands with the
RAF, before spending four days at sea to get to the South Orkneys -
well within the Antarctic circle.
He spent two months living on a research base on Signy - where
temperatures vary from freezing point to minus 44 degrees
centigrade - sharing the island with half a dozen scientists and
several hundred penguins.
Now, the work he did while living on the base is being exhibited at
The Manchester Museum in an exhibition called Due South.
Along with sketches, there are photographs and pieces of writing,
intended to give viewers an insight into what life is like in the
frozen wilderness.
"It's a very strange place, you've got very little by way of human
reference," said John, who spent 20 years as a geography teacher
before becoming an artist. "From an artist's point of view, getting
any idea of scale is very difficult.
"You've got these icebergs going by, that could be hundreds of
metres high, and you have to do a double take to appreciate what
you're looking at.
"One of the benefits of maritime Antarctica is that there's also a
huge amount of wildlife, there's a lot of seals, penguins and
albatrosses. That really made it for me.
"It was a very strange place to work - when you're in conditions of
minus 20 you can't spend a lot of time out in the field, so I used
other disciplines like photography and writing. I compiled these
visual diaries just to give people an idea of what day to day life
down there is like.
"Everyone knows what it looks like - it must be one of the most
photographed places on Earth, but I wanted this exhibition to give
a real sense of what it felt like to be there."
The exhibition is free and runs from tomorrow (Saturday)
until May 29.
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