Overview

Antarctica, that icy wasteland and extreme environment at the ends of the earth, was - at the beginning of the 20th century - the last frontier of Victorian imperialism, a territory subjected to heroic and sometimes desperate exploration. Now, at the start of the 21st century, Antarctica is the vulnerable landscape behind iconic images of climate change. In this genre-crossing narrative Gould takes us on a journey to the South Pole, through art and archive. Through the life and tragic death of Edward Wilson, polar explorer, doctor, scientist and artist, and his watercolours, and through the work of a pioneer of modern anthropology and opponent of scientific racism, Franz Boas, Gould exposes the legacies of colonialism and racial and gendered identities of the time. Antarctica, the White Continent, far from being a blank - and white - canvas, is revealed to be full of colour. Gould argues that the medium matters and that the practices of observation in art, anthropology and science determine how we see and what we know. Stories of exploration and open-air watercolour painting, of weather experiments and ethnographic collecting, of evolution and extinction, are interwoven to raise important questions for our times. Revisiting Antarctica through the archive becomes the urgent endeavour to imagine an inhabitable planetary future.

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9781788311694

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Reviews

At the heart of Polly Gould's remarkable book lies a paradox: when trying hardest to be posthuman she is at her most humane. The poetic utterance of her ecologically concerned, feminist voice ensures that the once heroic narrative of Antarctic exploration can never be the same again. * Ivan Gaskell, Bard Graduate Centre, USA * Polly Gould's Antarctica, Art and Archive is an absorbing, boundary-crossing experiment - drawing together a critical history of science and exploration, feminist theory, reflective writing around sites and archives, and a distinctive, impressive art practice. Unique and thought-provoking, the book is a delight to read. * Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge, UK * In this dazzling journey of ideas, curiosities, erudition and sumptuous images, artist and zoeographer Polly Gould refracts Edmund Wilson's exquisite recordings of his Age of Empire Antarctic encounters to conjure an 'Arkive' for the present: an 'elsewhere' that, on the verge of its disappearance, gifts us the promise of living as if other futures were possible. * Katie Lloyd Thomas, University of Newcastle, UK * One can get wonderfully lost in this book, as one can in the extreme landscape of Gould's enquiry. Antarctica, Art and Archive shows how to reimagine 19th-century exploration narratives using a subtle fusion of creative practice, archival work and materialist ecological theory. Yet another significant example of how visual art is central to the environmental humanities. * Andrew Patrizio, University of Edinburgh, UK *

Author Information

Polly Gould is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and Postdoctoral Fellow at Newcastle University, UK.

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