Polly Gould - Antarctica, Art and Archive

This book takes us on a journey to the South Pole (X) and back. The chapters reflect this journey as indicated

This book has come out of my work as an artist and my long enthusiasm for landscape and its representations, for narratives of geographic exploration, and for encounters with museum collections and displays. I want to thank my friend and fellow artist Anne Eggebert for her companionship in our working collaboration that preceded the writing of this book, most notably in the production of two Arts Council England funded touring shows that we devised and curated together: Nature and Nation: Vaster than Empires (2003) and TOPOPHOBIA: Fear of Place in Contemporary Art (2012). I had wanted to pursue my own writing and making by working towards a doctorate, so after many years of teaching in art schools in that most undisciplined of academic disciplines the studio practice, theory and history of fine art, I have found myself to be in the happy circumstance of being an artist working on research in the institutional context of the eclectic, synthetic and open discipline of architecture. I would like to acknowledge the considerable and varied sources of support that I have enjoyed while researching, writing and making my PhD project while at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. The full-time attention that I have been able to give to my research was made a practical possibility thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and my award for Doctoral Studentship funding. I have felt proud to be associated with my fellow AHRC studentship recipients. In addition to this source of funding a UCL Global Excellence Scholarship Award in 2010 made me feel very welcome at UCL.

My foremost thanks go to my primary supervisor, Professor Jane Rendell, to whom, as my closest reader, I feel immense gratitude. Jane is one who knows, certainly as much and probably more than anyone, of the intricacies, affects and spaces of reading and writing. I would like to thank her for her intellectual brilliance and her remarkable generosity. I thank Professor Rendell also in suggesting Professor Victor Buchli as my second supervisor in Material Culture at the Department of Anthropology, UCL. Thank you, Professor Buchli, for all those wonderful conversations many shared with Professor Rendell that were so interesting, offering innumerable insights, always immensely productive. I was very lucky to have Professor Nicholas Thomas, Professor of Historical Anthropology and Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge University, and Professor Penny Florence, Emeritus Professor of Fine Art History and Theory, University College London, as my examiners, and I am very grateful for their conversation, feedback and encouragement.

As for the wider academic environment, I wish to acknowledge the architectural historians, theoreticians and designers of the PhD program at The Bartlett School of Architecture for the standard of critical rigor and inventiveness to be found there. Among those academics and participants, I want to give an especial thanks to Professor Peg Rawes, who has introduced me to so many aspects of new materialism and invited me to participate in her Material Architectural Ecologies Seminar from autumn 2014 to spring 2015. It was Professor Rawes who also provided me with opportunities to present to visiting academics such as Professor Claire Colebrook and Professor Rosi Braidotti. Id like to thank Bartlett Research for funding me to attend the Professor Braidotti Summer School Critical Theory Beyond Negativity: The Ethics, Politics and Aesthetics of Affirmation in Utrecht in August 2014. Id like to thank Professor Braidotti for her inspirational, whirlwind-style seminars and lectures, and the opportunity during that week to present a small aspect of my research to her and the assembled participants.

The archives that house the Edward Wilson material to which I have referred are the other very significant institutions that have aided my research. Id like to acknowledge the support of those archives: Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge; Royal Geographical Society, London; The Wilson: Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, Cheltenham; Dundee Heritage Trust, Dundee; Wellcome Trust Archive, London; and the British Library, London. I am incredibly grateful to Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for their generous award of funding towards the cost of permissions for publishing images from the archives. I have also been generously supported by the Research Committee for the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, University of Newcastle, with support for the cost of color printing. The University of Newcastle and Paul Mellon Centre have made it possible to produce this book about art and the archive in a way that manifests its visual arguments with illustrations and not just words.

This research has been practical in that it has been developed through and in relation to my art practice. Id like to say a big thanks to my gallery, Danielle Arnaud. Danielle Arnaud made it possible for me to present the artwork represented here for my solo show No More Elsewhere (2013), and she also hosted two further performative lectures in 2013 and 2015. Id like to thank the participants in the discussion that followed the second performative lecture,