Early career artist Anna McKee proposes to spend two weeks at the field camp of the NSF-funded WAIS Divide Ice Core Project, a deep ice core that will provide one of the most detailed records of atmospheric conditions ever obtained.
Her sketches and photographs of field work and the landscape will be used to create a series of contemporary etchings and drawings. This work will add to a rich tradition of graphic arts from the early days of Antarctic exploration. The artist will create an exhibition catalog of these images with an essay describing her experiences, the scientific research and its contribution to the climate change story.
She will examine a variety of metaphors and visual themes as part of project, including the aesthetics of ice cores; memory (the existence of atmospheric gases in the cores as planetary memories); scale, place and time; parallel places (contrasting the conditions of 20,000 years ago on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet with those in the Puget Sound Basin, where she is based); and contribution to environmental awareness and understanding
Among her efforts to achieve a broader impacts for her project, she will make presentations throughout Seattle in libraries, high schools, after-school programs and an art school. A proposed gallery exhibit and presentations will be advertised throughout the library system, arts organizations and on a Seattle cable channel arts program. She is also collaborating with an inner-city public middle school science teacher to develop a multi-disciplinary presentation in coordination with their environmental studies curriculum, which can eventually be shared with other schools.
She also will maintain an Internet journal documenting her travel to Antarctica, the challenges of working on the ice and WAIS Divide field activities to share the artwork and its context nationally and abroad and she is planning presentations with TechREACH, an NSF-funded educational program that targets at-risk middle school students throughout Washington.
Visual artist Anna McKee traveled to the WAIS Divide Ice Core Program field camp as a participant with the 2009-10 NSF Artists and Writers Program. This visit was part of an ongoing inquiry into ice cores and the glaciated environments of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Pacific Northwest. Her primary goals are to create artwork that both documents this research and articulates a visual response to these landscapes, the ice specimens and the environmental changes that this research is tracking. Prior to the trip she spoke with several scientists to gain insight into current research, visited the National Ice Core Lab and the University of Washington’s Isolab to draw ice cores, and hiked to Northwest glaciers for sketching sessions. During this time, she created a series of etchings and drawings that explored the micro scale of ice cores and the macro scale of glaciers. While in Antarctica, McKee spent time sketching, writing, taking pictures, watching the ice coring operations and talking with a rich array of scientists and staff. She returned with a flood of impressions. Some of the more striking impressions are: the peculiar effects of undifferentiated space on perception, observing cutting edge science first hand, and the curious experience of being in a remote extreme place with very high tech and resource intensive support. In the studio, these impressions were sorted into themes: the story of the camp, the character of "the white", and the concurrent trapping and obliteration of substances on the plateau (i.e. the gradual burial of the arch, the constant shifting of the snow surface, etc.). McKee is now creating artwork in several groupings; The Camp Stories, Antarctic Space and Light, Ice Cores, and Temperate Glaciers. It is a process of sifting through a large collection of images, (ranging from her photographs and sketches, to scientific and historic sources) to convey the beauty and magnificence of these frozen landscapes in the face of environmental degradation. She began by creating drawings of her first impressions of the place and is now adding narrative elements to current drawings that allude to the changing environment and human history. The goal is for the viewer to consider their surroundings in order to reconnect to natural processes and our intertwined relationship with these processes. Schedule of Exhibitions and Outreach Events: 2010 "Phinney Resident Captures Antarctica in Art", article by Susan Beebe, Phinney Ridge Review, Spring 2010 Critical Messages: Contemporary Northwest Artists in the Environment; curated by Sarah Clark-Langager, Director, Western Gallery and John Olbrantz, Director, Halle Ford Museum, Willamette University – Traveling group exhibition with catalog. June "Visiting Artist" to art and science classes at two middle schools in Seattle. In addition to a slide and video presentation about her work and the WAIS Divide Ice Core Project, the students built "Mallow" ice cores using marshmallows to represent snow crystals and small candies to represent particles trapped in the snow column. Students then wrote about or sketched their core columns. November 12-December 12, Deep Ice, Deep Time, Exhibition of Prints and Drawings, Francine Seders Gallery, Seattle November 19-January 8, 2011, Artist Talk and Exhibition of Mt Waddington drawings at Gage Academy of Art, Seattle December, Community talk at the Seattle Public Library, Greenwood Branch 2011 January-April, American Meteorological Society & EcoArts Communicating Weather and Climate Group Exhibition at the Washington State Convention Center. November-December, Ice Stories, Three Woman Exhibition, including The Camp Stories prints at the Washington State Convention Center, Seattle Release of a catalog of artwork and journal entries. For more information about Anna McKee or to read her blog entries about this journey, go to www.annamckee.com
