TUESDAY POEM | Antarctica by Katherine Glenday

                                      

Sounding bells | 80 feet below the ice - Explorers Cove, New Harbor, Antarctica 2008

Katherine Glenday (with a little help from her friends!) Photograph by Shawn Harper

                                      ANTARCTICA

                                                  Our thoughts form us

                                                  And like the forams

                                                  And the caddis creatures

                                                  We live in our

                                                  Patterned habits

                                                  I can run with this

                                                  And do

                                                  Away from text and fact

                                                  And the common herded wayfare

                                                  Of thought and learned behaviour

                                                  It is too dense for me

                                                  I am overwhelmed already

                                                  And the truth of it

                                                  Scampers off somewhere

                                                  And snarls in the brambles

                                                  Beneath the woods

                                                  Of a forest of trees

                                                  I would rather drop my sounding bells

                                                  Below a frozen sea

                                                  And watch with my long distance heart

                                                  As my friends swim them down

                                                 To sing an angelus

                                                 On the ocean bed

                                                 Here all things are weighed

                                                 In the company of creatures

                                                 Who build their hearts on the sleeves

                                                 Of their houses.

                                                 Katherine Glenday

Katherine and I met at the age of eighteen as we embarked on a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Our lives have been woven together in ways mundane, mysterious and magical ever since. During our 2008 season in Explorers Cove, Antarctica, scientist Sam Bowser and I traveled with a series of porcelain forms created by ceramic artists Christina Bryer and Katherine. (You can see some of these on my new, very-much-still-under-construction, website here - scroll down to the bottom of the Antarctica page).

Katherine lives in Kalk Bay, a quaint fishing village in Cape Town (SA). Last weekend she opened the doors of her home and studio to the public for an extensive retrospective - 30 years of her exquisite porcelain work. The words 'numinous' and 'luminous' come immediately to mind. She is an artist in light, her work at once grounded in the natural world and occupying a space that's 'beyond' form. Weightless. Metaphysical. It needs to be seen to be believed --- please visit Katherine's website, prepared to be moved, awed and - yes - altered.

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Janis Freegard

with Tuatara by Nola Borrell

Please click on the quill. 

White - or not, as the case may be

I've had cause to reflect this past week on my relationship with Antarctica, remembering again how I sensed her before I saw her; how I found myself drawing her landscapes without even knowing I was doing so, conjuring up her spaces on paper only to find myself standing in them years down the track. It was as though some part of me knew we would meet long before the rest of me had even the vaguest inkling she would be written into my life's script. I do think there are times when our unconscious goes out ahead of us, scanning landscapes, embracing people, entering situations, noting features, atmospheres and coordinates so that when the time is ripe, we are ready to step into a space prepared, without our conscious self having any real awareness that this is what is happening.

When Antarctica's edges first came into view, I was standing with my face pressed up against the porthole of the Hercules airplane. My response to her was a somatic one. A surge of heat rushed through my body; I shivered at the same time. I don't know how else to describe it save to say it was like being seduced and chastened at the same time; pierced, buckled and somehow straightened. It was clear to me that uncharted parts of me were stirring, given a call to wake up and pay attention. This may sound strange and dramatic, but it wasn't. It was quiet and private and something I wasn't able to articulate till much, much later. One thing is certain -something inside me was shaken up and reconfigured on 6 October 2005.

The reason I've been thinking about these things is because this coming Thursday - 22 April (at 2.22PM) - the major collaborative piece I made with polar biologist, Dr Samuel Bowser, is being unveiled as a permanent installation in the foyer of the State Plaza building in Albany NY. Titled InterfaCE V, this work is the culmination of nearly five years' ArtScience exploration with Sam. It carries both our signatures, but rather than the work of two individuals, I see it more as a communal piece. As with most joint endeavours, it carries the energy and input of a great many more people than might at first meet the eye.

This weekend, I received the first few photographs of the mounting process... I confess I shed a tear when I saw them. You will know from previous entries on this blog that I get homesick for Antarctica. My buttons are easily pushed. Mostly, these are tears of gratitude for times, people and a place who together opened me up to 'more' and whose imprint I will always carry.

Positioning the vertical base plinth - Wadsworth Center foyer, Albany NY - April 2010

The photographs I'm posting here show the base template that will eventually hold 127 glass laboratory beakers that will in turn support 127 images (a combination of Scanning Electron Microscope imagery plus interpretative drawings)... From the front, the composition will appear to spin, perhaps even give off hints of sound. The underlying 'blueprint' is mapped out according to sacred geometry; rhythms are set up by prime numbers and phi...

Looking at it side on, people will be able to enter (metaphorically and with the eye, not the body!) the space behind the drawings to meander through the trails of a transparent labyrinth - an unexpected landscape of light and shadow that hints at worlds many of us never get to see; the universe beneath the lens of a microscope and/or the second heaven that hovers below metres and metres of heaving sea ice. The piece documents seven stages of polar biological research, with a specific focus on the motility and morphology of foraminifera. (Foraminifera are ancient uni-cellular aquatic organisms; living fossils underpin our evolutionary pyramid and that date back 650 million years). Rather than go into all the background details here, this link will take you to an explanation of the collaborative process and this one to the installation as it was first mounted at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs in May 2008.

For many reasons, InterfaCE is a piece dear to my heart.

InterfaCE - behind the frame

My task this weekend has been to put together a 7 min introduction re; this collaborative venture. Sam will be preparing something similar. A dear friend, Jack Harris, will read on my behalf on Thursday. The Director of the center will speak for 5 mins, too, and the brief unveiling ceremony will end with a minute's silence in honour of Earth Day.

Sigh.

Sometimes - often - I wish our seven continents were no more than a stepping stone or three apart.

Her bones - a weekend's silence before fat, cartilage and muscles are added