Emergent seas

For this project Pam McKinlay engaged in several discussions with GNS cartographer Belinda Smith Lyttle. They embarked on a series of conversations about what the manipulation of digital elevation data would reveal digitally about Antarctica's geological past. Belinda Smith Lyttle has spent years exploring the depiction of known qualities and quantities of surface in the frozen continent. It quickly became apparent that the scale at which she was working was enormous and that simplification of the data would be necessary to draw out the striking changes in topographic relief from submarine bedrock to the Antarctic Plateau.

In the final work by Pam McKinlay there were three light boxes. Two underlit woven tapestries were made in response to the topography and the landscape around the Taylor Mountains in Victoria Land, Antarctica. One depicts a dramatic exposed escarpment and the second is a white on white response to the fields of snow and ice in the glacier flows that cascade around and over mountains from the Antarctic plateau to the sea.

The third light box is an LED work with a play on words around the idea of "emergent seas". With some of the ice stripped off we can visualise Antarctica as a continent surrounded by a chain of outer islands. Beyond the outer Antarctic archipelago we get glimpses of the major rifts in the bathymetry of the sea floor and track these towards the partly submerged continent of Zealandia and neighbouring Australia, all of which once made up the mighty continent of Gondwana Land. 

September 2021

Artwork: Pam McKinlay 2021, Emergent Seas - the bedrock of Antarctica, three light boxes at 680 x 1080mm, weaving, LEDs, Arduino, engraved opal Perspex —  Pam McKinlay worked with Henry Greenslade and Leonora DaVinci, technical assistants. We also thank Hannah Joynt and Ken Wyber for their advice. 

Photo credit: © Pam McKinlay.