Day 31; February 22, 2009; Southern Ocean, Antarctic Circle
Average Daily Temperature: 33.88˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 10.82 mph
Feels Like: 17.65˚ F

One doesn’t forget the first glimpse of an albatross. With wingspans up to ten feet, they are stunning in flight—ever graceful in the thick ocean wind. Albatross are known for their gliding, and hardly need flap their wings. By using the updraft of the wind off the ocean’s surface and the shape of their long elegant wings they can glide endlessly. I was quite fortunate to see five species today: the majestic wandering albatross, the sooty albatross, the light-mantled sooty albatross, the black-browed albatross and the grey-hooded albatross.

Sitting on up on the monkey deck with birder Dennis Weir, I learned a great many things about the albatross, as well as the many other birds that were emerging as we traversed the latitudes northward. It is quite amazing, these birds that live out here in the middle of the ocean, with only the restless sea to land on! Albatross can go periods of years wandering the sea before returning to the South Atlantic islands where they were born in order to mate.

Several times through the day we also saw Humpback Whales, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in pods, and often near the lone icebergs that still persisted along the horizon. I was thrilled to witness one in the distance leap completely out of the water, and caught glimpses of others waving their fins or tails above the water. These graceful marine mammals had migrated here with their young for the austral summer.

Although we are now far from their origin, the ice shelf, the icebergs endure the distance. The gray and misty day displayed their ghost-like silhouettes along the horizon. Their forms emerged and dissipated as if memories, yet in their fortitude they persevered despite the warming waters that now surround them. I cannot help but wonder at the their fate, and at the fate of Antarctica itself, as well as the Arctic, as ocean waters in general continue to increase in temperature and as Earth’s climate changes. How can we reconcile the loss of these lands and their unique phenomena? How can we bear their possible extinction by what may be our own hand? Can we make the changes necessary to save these environments, these pieces of our natural heritage?

Just after noon, we crossed latitude 66 degrees and 29 minutes, and I left the Antarctic Circle behind. I have spent 26 days in Antarctica, 22 on the continent and four in the Antarctic Ocean. I have been opened to a world that I will not soon relinquish to memory, wanting to carry this experience afresh with me in every moment until I go back. This journey has strengthened my intent with my project, and impassioned me with the courage to accomplish it.
***

Day 30; February 21, 2009; Penguin Bukta, Fimbul Ice Shelf, Southern Ocean, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature: 24.53˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 14.77 mph
Feels Like: 2.38˚ F

This morning I awoke to find that the sea had literally begun to freeze. All around the ship, and as far as I could see, the surface of the ocean was covered in small discs of solid ice. Though the equinox is still a month away, which definitively marks the change of seasons, one can already see the signs of the quickly approaching winter.

Watching the Southern Ocean freeze before my eyes was an awesome sight—completely profound, if not seemingly impossible.

The discs of ice that had appeared overnight are called “pancake ice,” and they are formed in a most remarkable way. As the temperature of the ocean water begins to drop to the point of freezing, the surface water, which has less salinity, will begin to freeze first. However, as the ocean is never still, when the ice begins to form it knocks about gently on the surface waves, bumping into other forming bits of ice. The persistence of the motion means the ice plates are always colliding into one another, eroding each other’s edges which results in their round shape.

The last flights from SANAE arrived before lunch, and with everyone on board, the ship embarked on the long voyage north. As we moved away from the ice shelf, and the continent of Antarctica, the boat made its way through the newly frozen surface of the calm ocean, marking our path behind us. The petrels were darting around the ship, following our northerly tack. Icebergs towered, ever luminous, in all directions.

The panorama held my vision in earnest for the next six hours. The sunlight, which disappeared occasionally behind light cloud cover, was creating the seascape anew minute by minute. Literally, I could photograph the same direction three times within a short period, and the color of the ocean would be a gloomy gray in one, a radiant gold in another, and an icy deep blue in the third. Impossibly striking scenes passed before our eyes, every direction a new opportunity to gasp. I have over 800 photographs from this day, and have found it an entirely hopeless effort to try to edit them—each one holds a unique beauty, leaving me quite confounded as to how claim one superior to another.

Before long, the pack ice, which is the ice left over from the previous winter’s freeze, was scattered across the horizon, forming a theatrical stage upon which the light continued to play. Every moment was a magnum opus. Large flat pieces of ice in the shapes of squares or triangles became like monochromatic light sculptures. Jagged pieces, which sliced upward into the sky or downward into the sea, were like truculent brushstrokes upon the foreground. As I watched the landscape before me, I esteem more deeply the paintings I had seen at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts the day before I left on this journey—a wonderfully curated exhibition of historic paintings of the Arctic and Antarctic regions.

These artists, some of the first to see Antarctica, let alone paint it, had sought to represent the landscape with an air of emotionality—they attempted to reproduce nature accurately, but ever imbued with the human effort and adventure that led them to be there. I remember, as I looked into those paintings, wondering if they were a bit sensational in their approach, but now I believe that not to be the case at all. They are sensational, yes, but insofar as they accurately portray the real and persistent drama of the nature itself. Those paintings are more impressive to me now, having seen this place with my own eyes—I couldn’t have known beforehand the land those paintings yearned after. Now, I know.

I was fortunate to catch a glimpse of penguins amongst the pack ice several times throughout the day. On one large flow, there were four Adélie penguins and one Emperor penguin, which allowed a clear view of the size difference. Scurrying along the ice, sometimes standing upright looking directly at you, and then suddenly dropping on to their bellies and sliding around on the ice, they seem somehow comical and noble at the same time. I also spotted a small pod of Minke Whales in the distance, their dark fins emerging elegantly from the water as they surfaced for air.

At dusk, light continued in vain to pursue the expanding darkness. Several times the vista before me would be entirely a dark grayish blue, save for a single iceberg in the distance, which would be fully illuminated in the warm brilliance of the remaining sunlight. Perfectly horizontal lines of light would appear and disappear in seconds. The day, indeed a masterpiece in color and light, finally dissolved into night with the sun setting on the last remaining pack ice before we reached the open ocean. Behind me, Antarctica would still be illuminated, but in my growing distance, I could no longer see it.
***

Day 29; February 20, 2009; Penguin Bukta, Fimbul Ice Shelf, Southern Ocean, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature: 19.14˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 18.91 mph
Feels Like: -9.23˚ F

The first day on the SA Agulhas was spent acquainting myself with my new territory. This would be my first time on a sea voyage and there was much to comprehend, not the least of which was being atop a thing which never ceases to move about below you. The seawater around the ice shelf was relatively calm, but a certain finesse was still required in getting about the ship.

My cabin, which I would eventually share with three other women, was on the upper deck. Small but workable, the best feature was the portal view. The bunks were cozy, if a bit cramped, and I remarked at the support along the outer edge, which I imagined was to keep you from falling out of bed in rough seas. As I set about unpacking my things, I began to settle into the reality that this ship would be home for the two-week journey back to Cape Town.

Having missed breakfast—sure to be a daily occurrence given that it starts at 7:30 am—I was relieved to find that the heli deck was endowed with a rather elaborate espresso machine. For all its glamour, it was undoubtedly in need of a tune-up, as it arrived at a decent brew only after a bit of perseverance and fortuity. Alas, with veritable coffee in hand, I went about setting up my studio in one of the science labs at the back of the ship where Thomas, 1stborn and I had been given space to work.

Lunch came and went, the meals here being nothing more than tolerable sustenance. The bowl of pears was rather a treat—anything resembling “fresh” is always a high commodity—and I grabbed one on my way out of the dinning room. The food on the ship is really not something I wanted to spend too much time thinking about, given that most of it was packed into containers back in early December 2008. The same, of course, was true at SANAE, but the chef at the base was somehow more adept at preparing enjoyable meals. Alas, one learns to adapt.

I spent the rest of the day up on the monkey deck, a wind-protected bench at the very top of the boat which offers a 360-degree view. It was quite cold, but the fresh air was revitalizing, and with most of my body sheltered from the wind, I was able to sit and watch the environs for hours. There was much to take in as we lingered in front of the ice shelf waiting for the rest of the flights from the base—the sea was abundant with birds!

Snow and Antarctic Petrels darted around the ship, riding the potent air currents. These little birds, indigenous to Antarctica, are quite spirited. Flitting around the boat, they sometimes gain fast altitude and then hang in the air against the wind, as if suspended, and other times race past towards the tips of the waves. The Giant Southern Petrels are quite a bit larger, and have more elongated movements, languidly making wide circles around the ship.

All the while, the horizon was dotted with floating ice castles. As the ship made its way through and around them, our ever-changing angle of view showed one façade’s contours slowly shifting into others, creating vastly different shapes from a single iceberg. On approach, an iceberg would look entirely different than once we had passed it by.

The day parted with a waning crescent moon rising over the continent, half a mile away. The early twilight barely illuminated the edge of the ice shelf, the sun having left the sky blushing.
***

Day 28; February 19, 2009; Penguin Bukta, Fimbul Ice Shelf, Southern Ocean, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature: 20.93˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 35.1 mph
Feels Like: -31.72˚ F

Dawn both elated my soul and dimmed my heart, as this sunrise marked my last day on the continent of Antarctica for this journey. I had been up all night, again, attempting to observe and capture the ever-changing nature around me. The base was completely silent, deep in the arms of Morpheus. I, bundled in all of my gear, took the video camera outside to record the light from our massive star, which was proclaiming the day on the southern horizon.

Facing east into 30-knot winds, I sat on the ground in the tumult of wailing wind and fiercely blowing ice crystals. My body swayed in the chaotic pulsing of the wind’s force while I anchored the camera as best I could and began my 30-minute recording. The strong morning light refracted off each frozen water crystal and magnified itself throughout the snowy distance. The world around me was almost painfully radiant—as if the ice itself was ablaze. What a sublime and ethereal world Antarctica is!

This was the same phenomenon I had experienced my first day arriving at SANAE, and now on my last it seemed somehow fitting to be experiencing it again; a full circle. Cycles are the hidden breath of our being—the innate rhythm of traversing time. The closing of one cycle always denotes the opening of another, and as I looked out across the luminous layer of snow that hovered almost two feet from the ground, my own body seemingly suspended in its westerly flow, I surrendered to the cold, the wind, and my last moments on the Ice. Antarctica has shown me so much of its magnificence—I’m ever stunned and awed by its force and sovereignty.

Upon my return from outside, I rushed to put the remaining things into my bags and joined Thomas and 1stborn, and headed off to the heli-pad. It would take three days to transport everyone from the base to the ship, save the ten people remaining for the winter, and we had been scheduled to depart on the very first flight to the ship. Having secured the sole window seat in advance so I could photograph the landscape during our hour-long journey to the sea, I peered out of the bulbous aperture and watched as the helicopter leapt upward into the air currents. Neall and Kevin, our pilots, were generous with our flight, and we had a great tour of the nunataks and their wind scoops en route to the ice shelf. Beyond the mountain range, we passed over massive geometries of crevasses, and the elongated patterns of cloud shadows stretching, as if lines, across the snow-covered landscape.

With my eyes lost on the horizon, my mind turned inward, and before long emotion overtook me. I was leaving Antarctica, and the deep feeling of loss that emerged surprised me. My affinity for this land had been immediate and absolute, and my departure from the ice continent filled me with enormous sorrow. Tears flowed in gratitude for the pure beauty and grace of my experience here, and for the gifts Antarctica had bestowed. It is, indeed, a privilege to come to this land and experience its phenomenal nature. Antarctica shall never leave me.

My melancholy transformed instantly as the ice shelf became visible below, revealing the birthplace of icebergs. From this vantage point, I could see clearly where staggeringly large areas of the shelf had just broken off, and where others would soon follow. These ice islands, entirely unmoored, drift freely northward on their lonely voyage out to sea, where they continue to break down and melt as they traverse the latitudes toward warmer waters.

The sight was literally breathtaking—hundreds of colossal icebergs floated effortlessly along the coast, despite their sheer mass. Tiny air bubbles caught in the ice layers make the icebergs particularly buoyant, causing them to rise even higher than the surface of the shelf itself once they are freed from it. Amazingly, the visible area of an iceberg—above the ocean’s surface—displays only 30 percent of its actual size. The remaining 70 percent lies hidden under the sea.

It is a wondrous experience to see these remarkable forms scattered across the horizon, appearing as impossible mountains. Their surreal, luminous grandeur seemed in stark contrast to the grey-bronze sea. As I marveled at their amorphous shapes, the sun streaked golden light behind the thick clouds, painting the dark water with a warm shimmer.

We had begun our descent, and quickly the red deck of the SA Agulhas Research Vessel appeared below. We landed with the ship at sea, the watercraft rocking in the waves as I stepped off the helicopter. Finding my balance, and attuning my body to what would be two weeks aboard this ship, I looked back toward the continent. The icebergs, which I had seen from the air, were now towering around us, their presence insistent and hypnotic. The ice shelf behind them glowed brightly in the now midmorning sun.
***

Day 25; February 16, 2009; Vesleskaervet, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature:
Average Daily Wind Speed:
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The last three days were entirely given over to the completion of the ITASC expedition, and all of our work in the field.

After shooting the interior photographs of ICEPAC for the exhibition catalogue, and finishing each of our individual art projects, we began the complete removal of the mobile base—an exhaustive experience that took 30 consecutive hours of hard manual labor in the freezing cold.

It was a significant moment, as it marked the successful end of ITASC’s four-year undertaking. It also held the distinct poignancy, that subtle sorrow, that comes with seeing such a huge project come to fruition.

***

Day 21; February 12, 2009; Vesleskaervet, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica
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Tonight would be my last night sleeping in ICEPAC on this trip. The wind had picked up, and while ICEPAC remained calm and firmly poised against the 20+ knot winds, it was not impervious to the cold air. Deeply inside two sleeping bags, I was still tensely chilled in the biting temperature.

There are few things quite as humbling and centering like sleeping in a tent in Antarctica. Out in these harsh elements, one is called to be completely present with the force of this icy, windy continent—one must stay mindful, or face severe risks. Thomas, 1stborn and I have been remarking that living in ICEPAC, verses at the main base, puts one in this mindset. It has been aligning us with the reality of where we are on the earth. Our new motto for ICEPAC: Keeping it real in Antarctica…

One of my goals here in Antarctica this expedition season was to explore the possibility of the ICEPAC structure, in tandem with its wind/solar power, as the living space for my proposed 30-day field expedition for the production of The Polar Project. I need a structure that can house 6-8 team members, store our provisions for the potential month-long recording time, and provide workspace for monitoring the equipment, footage and audio. When Thomas and I first spoke, the intent was to come and see it work in the field first hand. The experiment was to live in the space for as long as we could once it was in operational order.

Although shorter than we had originally hoped, the time I spent in ICEPAC gave me ample opportunity to consider its potential for The Polar Project’s field structure. I believe the structure itself is a genius design in many ways. For example, the geodesic skeleton and the ovular shape made it completely feasible in strong winds. The harder the wind blew, the stronger its grip of the earth—even in the fiercest winds we had on this trip, the core structure didn’t even so much as vibrate in the wind!

There are several key things that I have been considering which would help regulate the temperature better from day to night, as well as keep it generally warmer. With a bit of innovation, the 2.0 version of this extreme weather habitat should be the perfect home for The Polar Project.
***

Day 19; February 10, 2009; Vesleskaervet, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature:
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I have been awake now for over thirty hours, having just completed my light recording piece. As exhausted as I am, I deeply enjoy the space that I traverse during these long periods of documenting light. Watching, diligently, the subtle shifts in color and intensity—I am ever entranced by the grace of natural phenomena.

In the late afternoon, the feeder flight arrived to take Alfons to NOVO, where he will catch his flight back to Cape Town. We all went down to send him off, waving goodbye as he boarded the aircraft.

I also had a package arriving for me on this flight, which had been flown in from Cape Town the day before. But as I am entirely fatigued from my long shoot, I will save the adventure of this package, and its contents, for tomorrow.

It occurred to me, holding my parcel and watching the airplane wane against broad the sky, that I have not seen a single jet trail since I arrived in Antarctica. This is something quite remarkable, as the skies I’m used to are generally cluttered with the crisscrossing lines of airplane exhaust. I found myself relieved to see a sky that was entirely untainted.
***

Day 18; February 9, 2009; Vesleskaervet, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature: 9.86˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 18.12 mph
Feels Like: -17.32˚ F

Today was quiet, and rather wonderfully subdued. I spent a good deal of the afternoon gazing out the window of my studio, meditating on the changing luminosity across the horizon to the south. The mountains appeared and disappeared behind think low clouds, and it was snowing heavily in the distance, leaving the farthest mountains obscured completely in gray opacity.

As the sun aligned itself on the horizon, there was another intense sun pillar. Rising like a flame above the rocks on the edge of our mountaintop, the beam glimmered outward a fiery pink from its golden core. Then, as if merely a chimera, it was gone, its floating crystalline form having vanished into the wind.

At 9:18pm, the exact moment of moonrise, I began a 24-hour light recording piece with the video camera. Tonight is the full moon, and its light shines in unison with that of the dimming sun. I will continue documenting the natural light for 15-minute durations every hour for 24 hours. The final piece will be my first multi-paneled screen video installation. For now, that is all I will say of it.
***

Day 17; February 8, 2009; Vesleskaervet, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature: 13.64˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 18.12 mph
Feels Like: -13.54˚ F

This morning I awoke quite early to find that the cold had seeped into my bones overnight.

Just before midnight last night I had walked down to ICEPAC, intent on sleeping the night in our field camp. The sun was below the horizon, but as I ambled across the snow to our field camp, there was still enough light to guide my way. The night was clear, and the deep evening colors had seeped into the ice—everything was indigo and pink, and the softness of the panorama lulled me into sleepiness.

Thomas and Firstborn were already there when I arrived, and after arranging my bed and getting settled for the evening, we decided to watch a movie projected onto the cloth divider, which provides privacy for the camp’s bathroom, at one end of the structure—powered, of course, by the wind and the sun. Snug inside my sub-zero sleeping bag, snacking on some sweets in our camp provisions, we watched “The Bank Job,” which played in stark comparison to our environs.

After the movie, Thomas and Firstborn already fast asleep, I lay there trying to figure out how to stay warm. Mummy bags, as they are called here, are designed for sub-zero temperatures, and their thick down-filled walls were quite necessary for camping in the Antarctic. There is a small peephole for your face, which, once you are completely zipped inside, allows you to breath. But even this small aperture lets the cold in, so I found myself wrapping my head in my wool hat and putting my scarf over my mouth so that I was breathing through it. In short, I was completely enclosed—and I was still cold. It seemed impossible, but for some reason, I just could not get warm.

My sleep was a bit restless, but upon awaking, my deep chill started to wane. The sun was quite strong already, and ICEPAC’s black exterior was starting to bring the heat from its rays inside. Touching the side of the tent’s red interior fabric walls, I could feel the radiation warming my skin, and the fabric itself was almost hot. So amazing that, even in this frozen terrain, one can still know the warmth from our star.

We lingered for quite a while at our field camp, racing back to the main base just as lunch was finishing. There had been an incredible light across the western planes, which I could see on our way back. The clouds, filtering just some of the sun’s rays, cast bright highlights and dark shadows across the ice. Nature is ever present in one’s consciousness here, and always unrepeated.

In the evening, after dinner, I gave a talk on my work and presented The Polar Project. It was great to have an opportunity to share my work with the scientists and base staff, as most of them did not know why I’m here. There was a wonderful response to the project, and I had lots of enthusiastic questions and people coming up afterward wanting to talk more about it or offer their services to the effort.

I reflected afterward, as I looked out my window at the darkening mountains to the south, about what a profoundly meaningful experience it was for me to speak the mission of the project while here in Antarctica. Sound, like light, travels across the landscape, gets absorbed by and reflected off of the snow and ice. Resonance. To know that my words and intent have, as sound frequency, reverberated into the ice, out beyond the wind and across the planes, I couldn’t help but wonder if Antarctica had heard me.

As the clock showed the day had come to an end, the almost full moon peeked its head up on the northern horizon. The moon has been below the horizon since my arrival, and so watching the luminous orb rise and set through the low clouds was like seeing an old friend. How fortunate we are to have a moon!
***

Day 16; February 7, 2009; Vesleskaervet, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica
Average Daily Temperature: 17.78˚ F
Average Daily Wind Speed: 13.42 mph
Feels Like: -2.35˚ F

A colour is never merely a colour, but the colour of a certain object…
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Here in Antarctica there is snow and ice virtually everywhere, a fact that may at first seem elementary but upon deeper reflection is infinitely complex. The impressive quantity of these natural crystalline elements extends as much vertically as they do horizontally, permeating the air and cloaking the land. The depth of the ice beneath my feet approaches 30 feet, with the thickest ice on the continent measuring nearly three miles. Above the frozen land, even the sky is saturated with floating ice particulate, which are seized by the wind, and whirled about at chaotic speeds. These icy eddies allow for the quality of air that encourages the magnificent atmospheric optics that I see throughout the day.

The luminous expanse of the ice fields tempts my eyes to peer out toward the boundless horizon, as if trying to redefine the periphery of my own vision, enticing me to look beyond the limits of my former perceptions. There, hanging on the diaphanous line between land and sky, I see only endless snow and ice. Even in the direction of the mountains to the south, where the nunataks of the Ahlmann Ridge Range break the flatness of the terrain, it is the insistent presence of snow and ice that prevails.

It would be natural to presume the whiteness of such a landscape, and yet the more time I spend watching the environment each day, the less I believe in white at all. While there are momentary glimpses of something that feels like white, as when the mid-noon sun pushes its strong rays against the landscape so that the sheer brightness of its downward angle eliminates all hope of color, in truth it is luminosity that reigns. White, then, seems to become only a vehicle for the action of light upon the landscape, yet what is persistently baffling is that white can only exist as a consequence of light.

The idea of white is rather like the idea of zero. In a sense they are both elusive, and at the same time they each define entire systems, in science and mathematics, respectively. While they themselves are intangible, they give birth to their own infinities. Both white and zero each contain within them their own intrinsic paradox: white appears to the eye as the absence of all color, and yet it can be scientifically proven that it is comprised of all color, while zero is the sum total of nothingness and yet it can be proven to exist. Interestingly, they have both in various ways referred to the idea of the void. White and zero are lone wolves, isolated, like the continent of Antarctica itself, from the very things to which they are intrinsically connected.

White is not, itself, a color in the visible spectrum of light, but rather the sum total of them all. If you take all the color frequencies in the observable gamut, which range from 380 to 750 nanometers, you would get white light. Sir Isaac Newton, standing on the shoulders of earlier optical scientists, showed us these basic principals in his legendary prism experiment. By placing a prism in the direct path of the sun, he saw that white light divided into the pure spectral colors otherwise known as violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.

If white is the summation of all spectral color, then why do we experience white to be the absence of it? While Newton’s discovery furthered science in extraordinary ways, what of this theory of quantitative differentiation tells us of the millions of other colors we experience that have no name? The world as we see it with our senses is not merely comprised of these six colors.

Philosophically, white has always been attributed to the “blank canvas,” new beginnings, and is a beacon for peace and purity. Yet, is anything actually white? When we think we perceive white, we actually can still see bits of other colors, as light reflects and refracts across objects and surfaces. For instance, observe an average white-painted wall throughout the course of a 24-hour period. At first you take for granted that it is white because you expect it to be white. However, when you look more closely, and with time, you will see how slightly bluish the wall is by the window at midday, and slightly yellowish it is by the lamp you turned on after sunset, and how an orange chair is reflecting slightly onto the wall, making a glowing orangey spot of color appear.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great philosopher and color theorist, was less interested in separating the spectrum into its divisible parts, as Newton was, but investigated instead the vague space between the pure colors, where the clear delineation between one color and the next was more mysterious. He looked not to the individual wavelengths but to the merging of short-wave light and long-wave light. He looked to where light interacted with itself. His research began with the notion that color, or light, was in fact a perceptual act that necessarily included a more introspective interpretation.

Looking out toward the horizon, with the subtle hues of colors blending and overlapping before my eyes, I begin to see the wisdom of his thinking. This complex system of light, and our seeing of it, maintains that the world of natural phenomena lies quite beyond the mind.

The observer does not see a pure phenomenon with his eyes, but more with his soul. Information from the eye depends on the disposition of the organ at the moment, on light, air atmospheric conditions, matter, manipulation, and a thousand other circumstances.
Goethe, January 15, 1798 (From Goethe’s Color Theory)

Observing, then, pure phenomenon itself, like the suns rays bouncing off the snow, or refracting through suspended ice crystals that are blowing in the strong Antarctic winds, I don’t perceive just one color, but many simultaneously. These substances—ice and snow—are prisms in their own right, and so display for us a myriad of colors as the result of light passing through them as they mingle together throughout the land and sky. But, then, the question remains, what color are all the individual frozen water crystals themselves? Are they white?

Physiologically, white is the perceptual experience which is elicited by light, and which subsequently activates the three kinds of color sensitive cone cells in our eyes in equal amounts. There is virtually an endless number of combinations of colors in the visible spectrum that will stimulate these cones in such a way—in other words, the illusion of white can be accomplished by an almost infinite number of luminous color circumstances. So then where does white exist? Is it a function only of our mind?

As I watch, minute-by-minute, the way the light interacts with the ice, snow and floating crystalline particulate, I am ever fascinated by the realization that what is purportedly “white” before me, is truly anything but. Explicit indigos, barely pale blues, vague, misty yellows, severe and subdued pinks, impossible violets and lavenders, farouche grays. These, and a million others, are the colors that pervade the sky and land here. Even if they are ever so softly imbuing the surface of the pale ice or snow, the color is present, and changing subtly throughout the day. Virtually everything in this landscape is a refracting surface, waiting to scatter and reflect light. Antarctica literally holds light within it. As coherent sunlight (white light) moves slowly throughout the environment here, it shimmers across and beneath the ice and snow, making everything luminous from the inside, and displaying colors that seem unimaginable.

Looking out again to the landscape as if for some clarity, I watch the deep interplay between light and crystal and find respite in its mysterious nature. Goethe reminds me, “…the highest is to understand that all fact is really theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of color. Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory.”

***