Antarctica, Art and Archive
December 2020.
Antarctica, that icy wasteland and extreme environment at the ends of the earth, was - at the beginning of the 20th century - the last frontier of Victorian imperialism, a territory subjected to heroic and sometimes desperate exploration. Now, at the start of the 21st century, Antarctica is the vulnerable landscape behind iconic images of climate change. In this genre-crossing narrative Gould takes us on a journey to the South Pole, through art and archive.
Through the life and tragic death of Edward Wilson, polar explorer, doctor, scientist and artist, and his watercolours, and through the work of a pioneer of modern anthropology and opponent of scientific racism, Franz Boas, Gould exposes the legacies of colonialism and racial and gendered identities of the time. Antarctica, the White Continent, far from being a blank - and white - canvas, is revealed to be full of colour. Gould argues that the medium matters and that the practices of observation in art, anthropology and science determine how we see and what we know. Stories of exploration and open-air watercolour painting, of weather experiments and ethnographic collecting, of evolution and extinction, are interwoven to raise important questions for our times. Revisiting Antarctica through the archive becomes the urgent endeavour to imagine an inhabitable planetary future
Less a Building: Interactions with the London Zoo Aviary
A research project and publication by Michaela Nettell with: Marcela Aragüez, Tim Dee, Polly Gould, Alex Hartley, Julie F Hill, Helen Jukes, Milena Michalski, Colin Priest, Ana Ruepp and Matthew Turner
Design by Marit Münzberg
Publishing partner: Passengers
Launch event: Saturday 4 September 2021, 3-5pm with readings at 4 o'clock
Passengers, 110 Foundling Court, The Brunswick Centre (Entrance 3), Marchmont Street, London, WC1N 1AN
Readings from the launch will be broadcast via Passengers Instagram Live
Realised by Cedric Price, Lord Snowdon and Frank Newby in the mid-1960s, the landmark London Zoo Aviary is known for its pioneering tensile structure, its immersive and sensory qualities and its architectural paradoxes of permanence/plasticity, transparency/opacity and openness/enclosure. Less a building takes the hiatus of the aviary's redevelopment in the early 2020s as an opportunity to consider the structure anew, exposing it as a powerful catalyst for experimental thinking and making.
Molar Heights and Molecular Lowlands: Scale and Imagination in Ruskin and John Tyndall
Chapter in collection of Ruskin’s Ecologies: Figures of Relation from Modern Painters to The Storm-Cloud, Edited by Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes, Courtauld E-Books, 2021.
John Tyndall (1820–93) was an Irish-born physicist, a mountaineer and an empirical scientist who made significant contributions to climate science, glaciology, public health, and epidemiology that still resonate today. With Ruskin, Tyndall shared commitment to the close observation of the natural world and the articulation of those observations in writing. Using an ecocritical approach, this chapter explores the resonances and dissonances between Ruskin’s and Tyndall’s writings on mountains and considers the cultural perspectives that informed their understanding of the other-than-human mountainscape. Ecocriticism has developed out of nature writing and deals with the web of relations between texts, cultural artefacts, nature, and environment. In this chapter, by an ecocriticism of scale I mean to distil this ecological methodology to concentrate on the functions of scale in the writing and thinking of Ruskin and Tyndall.
‘Ruskin’s Storm-Cloud and Tyndall’s Blue Sky: New Materialist Diffractions of Nineteenth- century Atmospheres’
Chapter in collection of Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture, edited by Coughlin and Gephart, published by Routledge September 2019.
This chapter aims to apply a diffractive reading to the specific ways in which John Ruskin and John Tyndall, as well-known antagonists, visually illustrated the sky in their public lectures. Tyndall and Ruskin, in their respective work, brought together previously discrete fields of knowledge into wide-ranging and associative inquiries. Ruskin’s ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century’ was first presented as two lectures delivered at the London Institution on February 4 and 11, 1884. The preface identifies the storm cloud as damp air mixed with smoke. Ruskin made Tyndall the frequent focus of his attacks on science, peppering his writing with snide comments as to Tyndall’s poetic efforts, criticizing Tyndall’s inaccurate language when “endeavouring to write poetically of the sun” and chiding him for his lack of erudition in his use of certain metaphors. Tyndall was an active participant in many related experiments, and party to the many discussions upon others’ efforts that took place at the Royal Institution.
House-Building in the Alps with Ruskin and Tyndall or CZOgraphy: An Ecocriticism for the Critical Zone.
A book chapter in this collection Mountains and Megastructures
Neo-Geologic Landscapes of Human Endeavour edited by Martin Beattie, Christos Kakalis, Matthew Ozga-Lawn, Palgrave Macmillan, January 2021.
This book explores the shared qualities of mountains as naturally-formed landscapes, and of megastructures as manmade landscapes, seeking to unravel how each can be understood as an open system of complex network relationships (human, natural and artificial). By looking at mountains and megastructures in an interchangeable way, the book negotiates the fixed boundaries of natural and artificial worlds, to suggest a more complex relationship between landscape and architecture