Antarctica, Art and Archive (Bloomsbury Press, 2020) is an exploration of the work of Edward Wilson, polar explorer, doctor, scientist and artist. It begins with his watercolours and painting practice in Antarctica but ripples out into other investigations. In this short film, Polly Gould looks at archival material at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge and discusses the ways in which her artistic practice informed her research.

Find out more about Antarctica, Art and Archive at https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/antarctica-art-and-archive-9781788311694/

This publication was supported by a Publication Grant.

Antarctica, Art and Archive

  • Head-and-shoulders portrait of Polly Gould.

    Dr Polly Gould is an artist, writer and curator. She teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture and was Post-doctoral Fellow in Design-led Architectural Research at Newcastle University from 2016-19. She shows with Danielle Arnaud in London. Her work includes watercolours, paper, glass, installation, performance, sound and time-based media. In 2012 as part of Eggebert-and-Gould she curated TOPOPHOBIA: Fear of Place in Contemporary Art. Gould’s current interest is in writing ecocriticism of the histories and futures of extreme environments with post-colonial, feminist and new materialist readings of the biographies of Victorians such as John Ruskin and John Tyndall. The material culture of watercolour and polar histories of exploration through the biographies of explorer Edward Wilson and the anthropologist Franz Boas are the at the heart of in her recent book Antarctica, Art and Archive, published by Bloomsbury, 2020 for which she received a Paul Mellon publications grant towards the cost of image permissions.