KEY POINTS:
EXHIBITION
What: The Light Horizon by Megan Jenkinson
Where and when: Two Rooms, 16 Putiki St, Newton, to June 21
Creative New Zealand has been running a long-term experiment on the country's arts community. It has been taking artists, poets and potters and subjecting them to discomfort, sensory deprivation, sensory overload and generally extreme conditions, then dropping them back home again.
Some produce work in keeping with their earlier output. Others make radical shifts in direction. Megan Jenkinson went on the Artists to Antarctica programme for two weeks at the end of 2005. The images she took languished for a year because of teaching commitments at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts, but she devoted a sabbatical last year to producing a major body of work from her experience.
The results are now on show at Two Rooms in Newton.
"My ideas changed once I got there. You have to give the programme an outline of what you want to do but, while you may have information about a place, it's different when you get there," says Jenkinson.
While her training is in photography, her practice is collage. She used to build up images by cutting up cibachrome prints, but the demise of that process forced a shift to digital manipulation.
The works in The Light Horizon fall into a number of series. "That wasn't conscious but there were so many aspects to the place that inspired different thoughts," she says. "I wanted to make pictures according to the idea, rather than try to fit everything into a stylistic overview."
The most self-conscious works are the three palettes, where Jenkinson has taken photographs and analysed the colour range within them, adding words which relate to those colours.
It was an idea she was working on before she went to the ice, but it came out differently to what she had expected.
"Finding 100 words for grey is hard," she says. "They are pointing out the way that when you are in this environment, you have to understand it by what you know already. But what you know is usually not there."
What is there is landscape. "I have never photographed landscape before and you can't help but photograph landscape. I had to get it working for me visually because it is disturbing the way you can never get a sense of scale down there unless you see something like a vehicle or a hut.
"Everything is so far away, and I am so used to building up collages which have a foreground, a mid-ground and a background. There, everything is in the background. The first time I saw Erebus, it looked like a hill. Then I saw it from a different point of view and realised it was a gigantic mountain."
Because there is no dust or pollution in the air, you can see vast distances. "It is so clear and so bright and glaring. It's merciless, the sun, when it is shining down on you and you are dressed in these really hot clothes which you need to have because it's cold but blisteringly sunny.
"The sky was blue and monotonous. One reason I couldn't do much with the photographs is they were generic and it didn't fit with what I had built up in my imagination about the place."
Like early polar explorer and photographer Herbert Ponting, Jenkinson manipulated the images to get a sense of scale. Some images are printed with areas of shadow, as if a spotlight is picking out part of the vast landscape. Others have cross shapes shadowed in, like the holes in the eye-masks the early explorers carved for themselves to cut down the glare.
Erebus features as part of a series of islands, created by a lenticular printing process so the landforms appear and disappear as the viewer moves around.
It's a process used for novelty items but, in the hands of Auckland print firm Outer Aspect, Jenkinson was able to use it creatively.
"It seemed to be the perfect medium for these islands. I thought of doing straight prints, but then they would just be pictures of islands and they weren't islands in the first place, they were mostly land forms made to look like islands."
She says Antarctic islands can be an atmospheric phenomenon, like the auroras she includes in another series.
"I wanted to evoke what early voyagers saw, which were mirages, land forms sometimes 200 miles away, but they perceived them as islands, and as they were looking for new lands to claim for their country, they were all marked on maps with precise latitude and longitude."
After the explorers came the scientists and many of the images draw on their work. Her earlier work with chandeliers is reprised, with glass facets replaced by ancient ice crystals which give clues on climate changes over the millennia.
There is also a series of drowned landscapes, with the image layers drawn not from her Antarctic shots but from other journeys.
"All the scientists down there are trying to predict the future, to analyse from their statistics what is likely to happen in five, 10, 50 years. This is my prediction," she says.
