Karin Goodwin
Sunday Times:December 5, 2004, Sunday
LENGTH: 459 words

An artist is following in the footsteps of the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton to create a new exhibition for a Scottish gallery.

E-mail artist to send daily show from Antarctic trek
Simon Faithfull has been commissioned by Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) to provide daily drawings during his two-month Antarctic trek.
Using a Palm Pilot hand-held computer as a drawing pad, he will send images by satellite to Glasgow, where they will be turned into engravings and form part of the CCA's new media exhibition.

Daily drawings will also be sent by e-mail to people who take up a free subscription through the CCA and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

Faithfull, a senior lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, is undertaking the trip as part of a residency with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). He began his journey two weeks ago and is due to arrive at Halley research station, on the Brunt ice shelf, before Christmas.

The 38-year-old is following in a long tradition of artists who have accompanied polar expeditions. Shackleton travelled with the painter George Marston on two expeditions. JMW Turner, the landscape artist, was inspired by accounts of his journeys.

Faithfull decided to make the trip after he carried out research into expeditions to the Antarctic and British whaling voyages of the 19th century.

"I was interested in the blankness of Antarctica -the images I have seen have an awful beauty to them. It always struck me as absurd, but fascinating, how people were attracted to these empty spaces," he said.

"The hunt for the white whale takes place in these icy waters and I want to record the remaining traces of whaling, particularly the abandoned whaling station on South Georgia and the whalers' graveyard on Signy.

"Antarctica seems to have a special role in literature as a blank space for the imagination but, so far, less so for visual art."

Faithfull said his work would not be influenced by the technology he will be using: "The Palm Pilot is only useful in that it allows me to do the very traditional thing of observational drawing, but at the same time send those images out to the world almost live."

Francis McKee, head of digital arts and new media at the CCA, said there was growing interest among artists in the use of new technology.

Glasgow already has a reputation for producing awardwinning new media work such as the short films of Rosalind Nashashibi, winner of the 2003 Beck's Futures prize.

In 1998 the Orkney-based composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was commissioned by the BAS and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to compose a sequel to Sinfonia Antarctica, written by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1953. It inspired several artists to take up residences with the BAS.