Recent centenaries have commemorated the heroic era of Antarctic exploration and the work of pioneers such as Edward Wilson, a polar polymath who was an explorer, doctor, scientist and artist. Yet, how did Wilson manage the impossible practice of en plein air (open air) watercolour painting in the sub-zero conditions of this extreme environment?
In this book, Polly Gould refracts the literature on anthropological studies, scientific experiments and art to arrive at her own cross-disciplinary reading. Through her use of the anthropologist Franz Boas'' work on the colour of water, however, Gould provides unprecedented access to the Antarctic art archive. In her analysis of this material, she uncovers a cache of work that challenges current readers'' understanding of the Antarctic and explores the realities of that environment.
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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