Antarctic Heart, 2001
Macrocarpa, salvaged totara, acrylic paint, iridescent and luminescent paint.21 suspended pieces, varied in height from 800-2200mm. Collection of the artist.

In 1999, as recipient of the Artists to Antarctica Fellowship Award, I travelled to Scott Base and filmed locations where diatoms have been found to survive - the sea ice of McMurdo Sound and the frozen surface of Lake Vanda in the Dry Valleys.
Research scientist Ken Ryan (whom I met in a field camp in Antarctica) was documenting the effects of UV light on diatoms, the micro-algae at the beginning of the food chain that are crucial to the survival of larger life forms. In the following months, both Ken Ryan and Waikato-based research scientist Vivienne Cassie Cooper sent information and electron microscope images that had been processed from Antarctic Core ice samples of the beautiful pennate and centric diatoms.  
I used the images to inform my sculpture and exhibited the works in black light, to reference the Antarctic UV experiments. The Antarctic video footage was layered with dissolved, animated and coloured electron microscope images with my suspended sculpture, that I had filmed in black light.
The soundtrack for the video, combined original music by fellow recipient Chris Cree Brown. The Weddell seal recordings, made with a hydrophone under McMurdo Sound in 1963, were given to me by physicist Dr. A C Kibblewhite.  The fellowship was supported by Antarctica New Zealand, Creative New Zealand and SONY New Zealand.  A video is included in this collection