Forty pages from Antarctica

Bea Maddock
Australia
1934 – 9 April 2016

Forty pages from Antarctica
1988
etching printed in tan ink, embossing, stencil and watercolour on 21 sheets
Place made
Launceston, lutruwita (Tasmania)
Medium
etching printed in tan ink, embossing, stencil and watercolour on 21 sheets
Edition
1/10
Dimensions
50.6 x 70.0 cm (each sheet)
Credit line
Bequest of the artist 2016
Accession number
20209G222(1-22)
Signature and date
Signed and dated sheet 21, l.r., pencil “Bea Maddock ‘88”
Media category
Print
Collection area
Australian prints
Copyright
© estate of the artist
Image credit
Photos: AGSA


  • Antarctica: five responses from the collection, 2020-2021



    Bea Maddock’s set of forty photo etchings, Forty Pages from Antarctica, and artist book, To the ice, were created after Maddock’s residency in Antarctica in 1987. Both works formally adapt the conventions of early explorers, of journal-keeping and topographical drawing, to record the voyage, yet Maddock’s tone is uncertain rather than definitive. On each sheet Maddock pairs her sketch of the coastline with a word. Over forty pages she makes the radical unfamiliarity of environment her subject: ‘Are we here just for saying “ice”, “iceberg”, “ice floe”, “ice cap”?’ She also asks a question about the landmass itself: ‘who has marked out the dimensions’. Maddock addresses the impossibility of visual and written language in such an extreme place, her words emphasising the alien ‘other’ landscape, a place with no human history.

     


    Maria Zagala, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs

  • My head is a map: Prints of the decade

    National Gallery of Australia, 1992

  • BEA MADDOCK 1934 - 2016

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 10 March 2017

  • Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, 1990

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 2 March 1990 – 22 April 1990

  • Antarctica: Five responses

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 5 December 2020 – 26 April 2021