Four talented artists will be travelling south this season as part of the Australian Antarctic Division’s (AAD) Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship programme. The programme encourages Arts Fellows to communicate their experiences via their artistic media, so that others can appreciate and understand Antarctica’s unique values and beauty and Australia’s role in studying and protecting it.
The 2005–06 Arts Fellows are:
TED MEAD is an accomplished photographer whose work encompasses landscape, wildlife and macro photography. Ted will photograph the Antarctic landscape and wildlife to complete his photographic project The Land of Extremes, which already includes images from the arid outback and the wet tropics. The collection will be exhibited at Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain Wilderness Gallery over the 2006–07 summer and in a travelling exhibition to be arranged through the national museum network.
PETER MORSE is a researcher and lecturer in Digital Media at the School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne, and in Communication Studies at the University of Western Australia. He has a background in semiotics (study of signs and symbols), artistic practice and computer visualisation, and an ongoing interest in the intellectual history and practices of science and engineering. Peter will take stereoscopic (3D) images of Antarctica and create a database of images that will be combined with satellite, aerial and ground-survey data from the AAD Data Centre to create an interactive 3D virtual reality representation of Antarctica. This virtual environment, Antarctica Virtua, will be documented online. Peter will develop high-resolution content that will be displayed in the new stereoscopic projection system to be opened at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 2006. This content will also be shown at several virtual reality centres around Australia and internationally.
ANTHONY EATON is an established author of books for children, teenagers and adults. Since 2000 he has published six books through the University of Queensland Press and aims to produce a new novel set in Antarctica. Anthony will research Antarctic life, its environment and history, to produce a book that will promote the interest of young adults in the issues and history surrounding Australia’s involvement in Antarctica.
JUDITH PARROTT will document the life of a community in Antarctica, depicting the energy of a dedicated team of people, to produce an exhibition based on the five senses. The exhibition will include photographs, collages, data projection, a CD of sounds and interactive items for touch, taste and smell. It will be displayed at the Brisbane Powerhouse in 2006 and may become a travelling exhibition through Museum and Gallery Services Queensland. A braille diary will be produced from the exhibition material. Judith staged a similar exhibition featuring ‘the Bolivian Indigenous community and their sense of place’ at the Brisbane Powerhouse in 2004.