PAINTING THE SILENCE
REFLECTIONS FROM ANTARCTICA
Painting the Silence: Reflections from Antarctica brings together twelve mixed-media artworks inspired by a century of Antarctic poetry. Created on century-old sail canvas, the panels trace the cycle of polar light — from unbroken day to the depths of night, and back again.
Threaded through are voices from the Heroic Age to the present, their words echoing across time with enduring impressions of silence, fragility, and awe.
Together, image and text invite reflection on how Antarctica continues to shape human imagination, and on our responsibility toward this vulnerable, extraordinary place.
The seed for this series was planted in the pages of The South Polar Times. Reading those historic volumes at the Alexander Turnbull Library, I was struck by the beauty of the poems written by men wintering in the early Antarctic huts. Their words carried tenderness, wit, and humanity — yet they remained largely hidden in archives. I felt a need to bring these voices to light, to allow them to speak again beyond the library walls.
Curious to discover what other poems had been written from Antarctica, I uncovered a wealth of work, spanning the Heroic Age through to more recent decades. Each voice was shaped by its own era, yet all were bound by the shared experience of life on the ice. These poems became the foundation of this new body of work — one that would give visual life to their words.
Text and storytelling have always been central to my painting practice, and this project naturally follows on from Frozen Horizons (2023), my multi-panel work on Shackleton’s Endurance expedition.
For this new series I worked on century-old sail canvas, gifted by friends and once destined for their yacht Aurora. Each piece is built in layered textures and mixed media,
with the selvedge edge left exposed across all twelve panels as a quiet thread of continuity.
The framework of the series tonally mirrors the cycle of light at the South Pole: twelve panels moving from the brilliance of unbroken daylight, into the depths of polar night, and returning to the wide light of summer. This seasonal rhythm also echoes the unfolding of Antarctic poetry — the first four panels giving voice to the Heroic Age, the dark winter months carrying the perspectives of mid-century writers, and the final five rising into the contemporary era. A horizon line threads through them all, binding the works into one continuous landscape that shifts in scale, perspective, and time.
Through these artworks I hope viewers will pause with the words of these poets — to hear the voices of the early explorers alongside those of our contemporary writers. Their insights, observations, and reflections on Antarctica remain as profound and relevant today as they were a century ago. This work is my attempt to hold space for those voices, and to remind us of the enduring human impulse to write, to reflect, and to bear witness in the most remote of places.