Sarah Kent
Time Out, April 19, 2006
LENGTH: 434 words

Simon Faithfull - Cell; East End
A circle frames a shot of the sea; Simon Faithfull filmed the voyage from the Falkland Islands to Antartica through a porthole on RSS Ernest Shackleton. Lasting 44 minutes, the video is boring yet mesmerising. As the ship sails through calm or rough seas, and under clear or leaden skies, the rim of the porthole changes colour from dull grey to glistening silver, like a painting that continually morphs. Some images are serenely beautiful - when the sea is radiant with sparkling light, for instance, the rim glows salmon pink - but stormy seas and forlorn islands emphasise the dangers and tedium of travel. As icebergs sail by and birds fly past, you sense that arrival is imminent, but also that the destination - the Halley Research Station - is an inhospitable place. To reach port, the ship has to force its way through pack ice but, as it docks, the porthole rim glows red with light reflected from lamps along the quayside.

Another video shows the ship's prow carving its way through pack ice. Shot from above, the floating ice looks as if it is tumbling down the screen like a waterfall. 'Escape Vehicle no 7' shows an orange figure (a boiler suit) attached to a weather balloon disappearing into the featureless sky. Another attempt to escape this desolate place fails, because the balloon contains too little helium for lift-off and the boiler suit flops about, like a beached seal, on the ice in front of the research station - a solitary hut on stilts. Seals play a starring role in a fourth video, shot in Stromness whaling station; abandoned in the '60s, the station is now home to a colony of seals who shelter from the summer snow among rotting furniture and rusting machinery.

Faithfull also recorded his two-month journey in drawings made on a palm pilot, then emailed to subscribers. Laser-etched onto laminate, 50 of these delightful sketches are on show. Beginning with the plane that took him from RAF Brize Norton to the Falklands, the drawings capture things seen en route. A Falklands sign warns 'Danger Mines', another in South Georgia reads 'Sir Ernest Shackleton, explorer died here January 5th 1922', while 'Blubber Cooking' appears on a huge cylinder at an abandoned whaling station nearby.

The whalers' graveyard on Signy Island and Noxious Bluff on Zavodovski Island, a volcano emitting foul fumes, both look horribly desolate; one senses enormous relief as, back in the Falklands, the artist spots a rabbit through barbed wire and, from the plane flying home, sees the Atlantic far below. Time spent in this inspiring show makes you feel as if you have travelled with him.

Sarah Kent
Time Out, April 19, 2006
LENGTH: 553 words

The art profile - Simon Faithfull
Simon Faithfull is the first visual artist to win an Arts Council fellowship to travel to Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey. Most of the two month trip was spent on board RSS Ernest Shackleton, which was taking scientists and supplies to the Halley Research Centre where they spent only five days before returning.

What did you plan to do there?

My proposal was about the journey. My previous work has often involved humdrum and anti-heroic journies, such as a bicycle ride up the River Lea from Silvertown (opposite the Dome) to its source under a tower block in Luton, where water emerges from a concrete culvert and trickles over beer cans. En route I made drawings on a palm pilot of anything that caught my eye, then stitched them together into a scroll, which I posted on the web.

The journey to the Antarctic was during the southern summer. There were about 60 people on board, mainly scientists and steel erectors who heighten the stilts on which the base is built, because one and a half metres of snow falls each year. The station is ten kilometres inland from where we docked, and when we arrived we were the only people the scientists there had seen for eight months; 12 of them stay there all year monitoring the weather and the hole in the ozone layer and drilling ice cores to map climate change, but there's a post office where you can buy postcards and stamps and have your letters franked!

What is the landscape like?

I was afraid I'd come back with images looking like photographs from the National Geographic, but it's the opposite of scenic. Antarctica is a huge glacier, which is absolutely flat and cloud-covered, but the light is almost supernatural in strength; its intensity is more than your eyes can deal with. The sun doesn't set and there's a weird phenomenon called 'ice blink'; the underside of the clouds glows white with light reflected off the ice, so there's complete white-out, which is utterly disorientating.

Because there's no moisture, the air is crystal clear and you can see further than ever before. But because there's no horizon line, you lose all sense of scale and, instead of a landscape unfolding towards the horizon, there's literally nothing to see. As you walk you can hear your feet making footsteps, but you can't see them because there's no definition or contrast, so it feels claustrophobic - as if everything were folding back on itself.

I'd gone all that way to see the wilderness, but there was absolutely nothing to see, except the stuff brought there by people!

Why did you stop at Stromness?

That was a fluke. It was the place that Shackleton had managed to reach after spending two and half years on board a ship locked in the ice. Six men rowed 800 miles from Elephant Island to South Georgia, but they landed on the wrong side of Stromness and had to cross Alpine ranges to reach the whaling station; there were about 100 whalers there at the time; it was like a gold rush town.

I was allowed ashore because the captain of our ship wanted his crew to get some training landing small boats. I spent about 75 minutes in the abandoned station filming the seals. It was almost midsummer's day and it was snowing; that's as good as the weather gets!

Interview: Sarah Kent.