Moira Jeffrey
The Herald (Glasgow), December 31, 2004
LENGTH: 865 words

Simon Faithfull, the first visual artist in residence with the British Antarctic Survey, is sending daily sketches of his impressions of the area via Palm Pilot to galleries and individuals.

Faithfull's Freeze Frames
Come midnight tonight, thousands of Hogmanay revellers will be toasting 2005 in remote locations, many of them smug in their choice of splendid isolation over city madness.

Few, though, could boast the kind of remoteness chosen by the artist Simon Faithfull. He's in the Halley research station, an eerie stiltedbuilding teetering over the icy wastes of Antarctica, a place that Faithfull described by e-mail on the day of his arrival on the continent by boat as, "implausibly white and blue".

"I've been filming out of my porthole as they smash their way through the sea ice to create a mooring point, " he typed from the comfort of his cramped, but warm, cabin on the RSS Ernest Shackleton. "I have to wear sunglasses just to look out. The snow and ice is sculpted and cracked into strange cartoon shapes - where there's a crack, it seems to glow from inside with a strange 'gas-ring' blue light."

Paradoxically, Faithfull's journey, as the first visual artist-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey, may have taken him to what seems like the very ends of the planet, but has also put him in touch with thousands of strangers. As well as carrying on e-mail conversations with people like me, his project, Antarctica Dispatches, has been to make a simple line drawing of his surroundings every day using a Palm Pilot.

Each morning, he places a drawing on his website and sends it to a worldwide list of e-mail subscribers.

Until January 16, inboxes across the globe will receive a daily image. At the same time, three British venues, among them Glasgow's CCA, are printing each drawing on to Perspex and displaying it as a visual diary of his trip. The drawings record Faithfull's two-month round journey from RAF Brize Norton to the Falkland Islands, and then by sea to the research station.

The BAS is a publicly-funded research organisation that employs 400 people at its Cambridge HQ, three Antarctic research stations and in logistical support. Creative types, though, are recent additions to its crew as part of a scheme supported by the Arts Council of England.

"Fellow travellers are either technical crew who keep the bases running or scientists, (beakers as they called down here), " says Faithfull. "Both seem equally bemused by my projects. There are some parts of the Antarctic that are visited regularly by tourists or the media, but the station is far enough south to be the preserve of science. There are a definitely a few people who question the legitimacy of my presence but there are others that have responded well to the drawings. In fact, I will be making another section on my own website for some of the drawings done by other people on the boat."

Faithfull's own drawings capture both the boredom and the excitement of the journey. The first sight of penguins, the starkness of the Antarctic environment of the ship and the technology of the research station, and daily minutiae of life there.

Above all, they illustrate the drama of the landscape, something Faithfull describes as "a hallucinatory jumble of blue ice, white snow, grey and white sky. It's actually very unreal and kitsch in places: the breaking sea-ice cracks up in huge chunks like monstrous mint cake - blue inside with a coating of fluffy white".

The drawings are crude, but wonderfully clear. The limitations of the technology produce something reminiscent of Etch-a-sketch, the children's drawing toy, rather than the white heat of technology.

"Often it's the failing, fumbling of the line that makes them communicate something." he says.

"As a drawing tool, I'm attracted to the clunkiness of the Palm Pilot, rather than being infatuated with the slickness of newmedia.The restrictions that the very basic grid of pixels imposes forces me to create very simple, economic drawings - the opposite of faster, smoother Photoshop graphics. I'm not really interested in the technology itself, only as a tool to allow me to do a very simple thing."

But it is the drawings' cumulative effect that's most interesting. Lined up in ranks at the CCA, or as a collection of e-mails, they are the modern equivalent of the traditional explorer's diary, recording the strangeness of the environment alongside the technical details of location.

Beneath the rational language, the daily details, lies an emotional or philosophical journey and a unique experience of the vast emptiness of the continent.

"Faced with the empty expanses and mind-numbing, awful beauty of Antarctica, it somehow seems only possibly to concentrate on the details. Hopefully, as these accumulate, they are creating an elliptic impression of what its been like in my head as I take all this in, " says Faithfull.

"Christmas was more or less cancelled. From now, until I leave with the ship, is the most hectic time, getting all the supplies off the ship and the rubbish back, so, there's not a lot of time for festivities."

But for those of us who quite fancy getting away from it all, what a way, and what a place, to mark the turn of the year.