BY GILBERT WONG
When sculptor Virginia King recalls Antarctica, her voice changes. Memory colours what she says with a sense of wonder. The icy continent becomes a place of miracle and wonder.
Start with stepping off the plane at Scott Base."That was like walking on clouds and not falling through." Inside the metal corridors of the base, she started as sharp flashes of static electricity shot from her fingertips like hex bolts of fire in the dry air.
One night she slept outside. As part of survival training, King was taught how to build a snow cave for shelter and she lay cocooned in an igloo of frozen water for a night with a continent of ice beneath her. "You're nestled in all these layers, but you can still feel the ice, there's always the ice."
Off Cape Royds she heard the Weddell seals sing, their ululations like a sinuous sound sculpture. Scott's hut sits on Cape Evans, a time capsule dedicated to the heroic tragedy. She sat in the hut, peered at what the doomed expedition had left and tuned into the eeriness left by the long-departed before a helicopter beat its way to shuttle her back to the cramped comfort and humanity of Scott Base.
In the hut, mutilated seal carcasses lie preserved in the cold. "They were like Joseph Beuys sculptures. There were boxes of skua eggs with amazing textures."
Slipping and sliding across the deep-frozen Lake Vanda in the dry valleys, she listened to the katabatic winds that race down slopes, dropping the windchill and dusting up snow into endlessly complex-patterned drifts, each unique and never to be repeated. Snow doesn't fall in Antarctica. Snowstorms come when gusts whip up snow into a frenzied cloud.
Those winds gust up to 320 km/h and can drop the chill factor from a relatively balmy -5 deg C to below -20 deg C, frostbite territory.
King, with Christchurch composer Chris Cree Brown, spent nine days in Antarctica last November as an Antarctic Arts fellow, part of the Antarctica New Zealand programme that has seen writers, painters and poets visit the continent since the 1997-98 season, accompanying the scientists working during the summer season.
"We arrived late afternoon and stepped out. There were no verticals as far as you could see. There was this horizontal land and it didn't get dark, so you were constantly charged.
"We didn't sleep much. Yet you didn't feel exhausted because there was this incredible energy. I had read how Scott and his party worked away at 3-4 am and wondered how they kept going, but there's something about life using what light it can that keeps you going and going."
The long days of summer are followed by a six-month night of winter. Antarctica is about extremes: topography, temperature, life forms, the very days and nights. It was beautiful, King says, but she never felt she belonged.
She tells me all this in an Auckland boatshed. Instead of watercraft, the shed houses the work that resulted from her visit. Hewn from macrocarpa with powertools, the forms for her Antarctic Heart exhibition are simultaneously solid and graceful, turning in breezes with the ease of dandelion heads.
They are representations of diatoms, microscopic algae that lie at the bottom of the food chain in the ocean's waters. Then comes a surprise. King flicks the lights off and under an ultraviolet bulb they glow, an eerie electric blue in the darkness, slowly turning in the air as they must do in the sea.
The diatoms lie dormant through the long Antarctic night, thriving when the day of summer breaks.
"I wanted to bring out the feeling of intensity in the space ... this long dark followed by the energy."
When the work is exhibited next year in a touring exhibition, accompanying the sculptures will be recordings of Weddell seals, taped during the 1960s by retired physicist Alec Kibblewhite. Retired microbiologist Vivienne Cassie-Cooper and Paul Broady of Canterbury University passed on their knowledge and slides of Antarctic diatoms, and King hopes to project video images of Lake Vanda onto the diatoms to create a multi-sensory experience.
Like many New Zealanders of her generation, King spent some time at university before travelling overseas in the 60s. But she never felt at home in the Northern Hemisphere. She missed the Northland beaches where she spent so much time growing up in Ohaeawai and then Paihia.
The natural world has long been a focus of King's work. Previous work includes coral formations, seeds, foliage, all transformed from tougher materials by circular saw, jigsaw and angle grinder. In 1998 her work Limpet Shrine, a bronze 2m-diameter giant limpet, took the Memory Award, donated by film-maker Jane Campion in Sydney.
She believes perhaps the inspiration lies in her childhood wanderings along shorelines.
"You can't get anything richer than those experiences of being close to the tides and sea. You know every rock pool and think you know everything in it."
Which may be why she enjoys collaborating with the scientists she met working on the Antarctic Heart project. They share the same sense of wonder at nature's creations and, like King, want others to see the fragile, beautiful world as they do.
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