Cold Front

Curator Meryl Ryan brought together the works of nine contemporary Australian artists including Dr Lisa Anderson, Jorg Schmeisser and Alison Lester to address the Arctic and Antarctic through personal experience of place. Cold Front was held in conjunction with an exhibition of photographs by Frank Hurley and Herbert Ponting whose seminal images of Antarctica can be found in every public photography collection. Cold Front added knowledge of both Antarctica and the Arctic through new, contemporary renderings. Duxbury reflected on climate change and its effects, extending her earlier explorations with new media. Her three pieces addressed the Artic through a variety of media with the titles Lost (for) Words, a theme which could be interpreted in a number of ways - to represent her experience of the Arctic as 'a place that was so stunningly beautiful it left me Lost for Words'; to relate to the effects of climate change (which leave us speechless) and to the indigenous population - the Inuit of Baffin Island - with whom she stayed for 4 days, finding their language incomprehensible. The Romanised text, based on Pitman shorthand, includes few vowels but many letters used rarely in English - k, q and j. Duxbury was aware that global warming might leave them without snow, for which they have 24 words, and these words would become redundant. 'Loss of words equals loss of culture'. Duxbury had not created wax tablets previously and used a shelf with its associations, being left on a shelf, redundant, unwanted, out-of-date. She used paraffin wax, which is derived from petroleum, the very material that is causing climate change and the ice to melt. The text in, Lost (for) Words-account, is a palimpsest of historical narratives of the difficulties of penetrating the ice of the North-West Passage. The single words in each frame that have 'melted' from the surrounding voices spell out nostalgia for the ice and snow. Over 4,500 people saw the exhibition.