Conversation Pit For The Iceview House
2024/25
In the Textiles Bienale, Rijswijk Museum, The Netherlands
June-Nov 2025
Dye sublimation prints on fabric, timber, rug, furnishings, wearable cloak. 3m x 3m x 2.4m
A storytelling voiced by fabrics- of tents, flags, banners and curtains- of provisional fabric architecture and markers of climatic thresholds. Set in a gallery-based room-set and conversation pit; drawing on the climate optimism of a mid-century living room, at the close of the Holocene.
The installation also functions as an analogue weather reporting station- providing a daily update on weather at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole base (90.0000° S long 0.0000° E) through a daily performative rehanging of fabric elements by gallery attendants.
This work reflects most broadly on the memories of human activities that are held by the airs, waters and soils of our planet. The term *Anthropocene* describes the marks of human activity on the planet, within the present and future geological records, and this work reflects on that notion of molecular memories of human activities.
Lead dust from the mining for silver as far back as the 13th century has been detected in ice core samples in Antarctica. Small amounts of lead dust from pre-Columbian mining; Spanish colonial mass extraction across 300 years from Potosi mine in Bolivia; through to 19thcentury silver mining in Broken Hill, Central Australia. The lead from each mine bears a unique isotopic fingerprint, part of its origin story, revealing each dust layer’s original mine.
The antarctic ice cores; recall -through the horizontal layers of lead dust embedded year on year- the economic output of human extractive activities in distant mines over many centuries. The rise and fall of colonial powers, of economic tides, of resource boons and curses.
Led by the winds, conveyors of the earth, this is a consideration of atmospherics and thresholds. To reflect on the indistinct zone between insides and outsides. An ongoing telling of stories from one air across two continents and an ocean.
Exhibited in POST gallery, Adelaide 2024 and re-worked for the Texiles Bienale, Rijswijk Museum, June 2025
In this work fabrics voice the storytelling. An oversized image of a galena (lead/silver/zinc) crystal curtains off the inside of the conversation pit.
The curtains visible from the rear of the installation, the *outside*; display the moment Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian team *claimed* Antarctica, in1911.
The fabric of a fragile tent supporting a flimsy flag, retold again through fabrics of everyday indoor climate making- curtains, cushions, chairs, reflect on the meaning of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in times of climate uncertainty.
Every day the fabric hangings on the shelving are updated to reflect the daily weather conditions at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole base (90.0000° S long 0.0000° E), to be decoded by visitors resting in the space.
For the related essay on the wind that undertook this work, SIFT by Naomi Riddle: HERE
