 Archive or work can be so productive, it's not static, it's open to reinterpretations, reorganisations and fundamentally it's about bringing new organisational narratives to them which can radically revitalise or reshape them. I received a grant from the Paul Mellon towards publication costs. The book is titled Antarctica Art and Archive. It's an exploration of the work of the Antarctic explorer, Edward Wilson, who died in 1912 with Scott and his party and failed attempt to be served to the South Pole, so it really begins with his watercolours and his painting practice in Antarctica but it also kind of ripples out into other investigations. The interesting thing about making watercolours in Antarctica was that on a first glance I kind of assumed that they looked very much like open-air watercolours, but I quickly understood as I got into the research I recognised that Wilson's method in his practice wasn't like that at all, it just couldn't be. Your fingers freeze, you can't get your gloves on, the light is too bright. All these things get in the way in a very physical way. You can't have water in sub-zero conditions, it's frozen, the watercolours just don't work. So I realised that his process in these very very cold conditions was one where he had to use a pencil and annotate with colour notations. So here is his note on this one saying nothing could be too extravagant in the contrast and colour with the exclamation marks. Little sketches which he would then take back to the hut to work up subsequently. Sometimes he just writes like the word grey in a long sweep across the page which at first glance looks like just a very fluent line of landscape topography. I wanted to use art making as a way to see what I could learn about Wilson's method and process. In a simple way I just proposed to myself that I would copy what I found in the archive. Initially I thought I'd like to make watercolours of the watercolours. But what I found very quickly is that the space of the archive is in a weird sort of distorted reflection. A site of climate control can't bring watercolours into the archive. You can't work with water and watercolour pigment next to these archival materials, it's just not allowed. In a weird symmetry I found that I too wasn't able to work in immediate relation to my objects of observation. With watercolour I had to resort to pencil and annotation and making notes which I would then take away. Turquoise blue sea at base of ice mass but I ended up imitating Wilson's process. I really wanted to think about how I could re-engage with the kind of surround three-dimensional experience of these, what are huge landscape spaces and I started to work them up as these watercolours painted on sandblasted glass and then I used mirrored globes to create these anamorphic distortions that when reflected in the mirrored surface become a kind of coherent landscape views. I've often had images and bits of paper and ephemera collected around me in my studio and I did this with a more of a focus on Antarctic related topics and images and it allowed for me to reorganise and re-curate I guess and that's another thing I was very interested in about how different stories get told through the different arrangement of objects and that's what my own Antarctic archive allowed me to work through as a methodology.