2003

Safe Return Doubtful at the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch NZ.

In her 2009 paper Australian Artists and Museums, the academic Jennifer Barrett wrote that ‘For many artists a large part of the appeal of the museum is the sheer aesthetic power of objects in thier collection.’ s

In an article in the Guardian newspaper on November 25, 2002, art critic Jeanette Winterson responds to the question of why art matters by stating that art is a way of forcing us to concentrate, and to enter into a dialogue that ‘continues between object, maker, owner, viewer, listener, reader’. In this exhibition I have concentrated on the experiences of individual participants within the presentation of stories from the Heroic age by the Canterbury Museum. In particular I have sought to present some of the many possibilities of dialogue from the experiences of Antarctic exploration. Exploration is used to describe both physical and scientific investigations.

Where possible the individual’s own words are used. These words may have been written self consciously with an appreciation of their potential role in history or alternatively written less formally but still self consciously in letters and notes to family and friends. This exhibition includes only some participant’s histories. It includes those who could or were interested in making a record, and those whose families then preserved those records and placed them in the public domain. However, it still excludes the accounts of the expedition members who did not record theirexperiences or those whose material has been lost or kept private.

Contemporary ideas about adventure also place increased emphasis on the experience of the individual. Expeditions from the Heroic age, like many contemporary expeditions, had difficulty raising sufficient funding to enable the most appropriate or adequate materials to be purchased. Similarly the outcomes of the expeditions of the Heroic age raise questions about how success and failure are determined and judged by the participants. Further issues relating to the valuing of skill, physical fitness, attitude and teamwork have parallels in contemporary explorations.

Finally, consider this comment from one of the participants in the contemporary debate about Scott’s last expedition. On an interview aired on the 10th September 2001 on the BBC, Huntford asked: ‘What kind of explorer is it, who is taken by surprise?’

Fiona Davies July 2003

Deidre Brown wrote in her speech to celebrate the opening of this exhibiton that

Fiona’s work examines the notion of the heroic, as it appears in this gallery of heroic Antactic acheivments, but not in a way that belittles the accomplishments of explorers. Here, she reveals the words and imagery of some of the forgotten members of the expeditions, and the collective nature of exploration. Above the cases devoted to individual expeditions she presents their everyday narratives stamped, in a commemorative manner, into metal plates - the sort of memorial normally reserved for poetry or testimonials rather than atedotes and observations.

The sound work consisted of excepts from the journals by Captain James Cook and the Coleridge poem The Ancient Mariner