Women of the Ice

This public program offers insights from five women who have journeyed to the Far South. Hear as they offer personal experiences and reflections from the front lines of a changing climate.

In February 1961, Nel Law became the first Australian woman to set foot on Australian Antarctic Territory. Her husband, Phillip, smuggled her aboard his ship during a scientific expedition to the continent. While women from other countries had been visiting Antarctica since the mid-1930s, Australia did not officially permit women to travel there until 1974.

Historically male-dominated, visitors to Antarctica increasingly reflect gender and cultural diversity. Approximately half of the artists and writers who have visited through the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship program have been women. 

Women are drawn to Antarctica for vastly different reasons. Join us on 17 April to hear from an ocean advocate, writer, artist, researcher and base leader at a heritage site about the lure of ‘The Ice’, how it transformed them and what stayed with them after they returned.

Image credits: Polly Stanton, 'Edgelands' (video still), 2026. Image courtesy of the artist.

This public program is presented by RMIT University as part of the exhibition 'Creative Antarctica: Australian Artists and Writers in the Far South', across both RMIT Gallery and Design Hub Gallery.

Speakers

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Melissa DeLaney is CEO of the Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT) and a creative practitioner working with social sculpture. She leads national programs connecting artists with science, technology, research institutions and communities across Australia. With over 20 years’ senior leadership experience, her work bridges creative practice with government, education and innovation sectors, strengthening cultural capability and cross-sector collaboration. Melissa is an Adjunct Senior Industry Fellow at RMIT School of Art and an Asialink Leaders Fellow, with recent collaborations spanning universities, environmental research organisations and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD).

Dr Polly Stanton is an artist and filmmaker. Her films and installations focus on contested sites and extractive zones, presenting landscape as a politically charged field of negotiation, entangled with history, technology and capital. Her mode of working is expansive and site based, with her practice intersecting across a range of disciplines from film production, sound design, fieldwork, performance and publication. Polly has exhibited widely in both Australia and overseas and has been the recipient of numerous grants and Artist-in-Residence programs. She is a Senior Lecturer in RMIT’s School of Media and Communication.

Dr Adele Jackson is an artist, researcher and curator whose work considers the role of art and material culture in developing understandings of the far south. She is a human history curator at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, a postdoctoral researcher with the University of Tasmania’s Creative Antarctica research team and an adjunct researcher at the University of Canterbury. She has worked in Antarctica since 2014, including two seasons as base leader at the Port Lockroy heritage site working for the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust. From 2015 to 2020 she led Antarctic Sun Lines – a pan-Antarctic arts collaboration with national Antarctic programs using solargraphs to visually locate the continent in relation to natural forces that create and sustain life on Earth.

Tishiko King is a proud Kulkalaig woman from the Island of Masig and is an Ocean & Climate Advocate. In addition to her advocacy in Climate, Tish works with the Philanthropic sector to redistribute wealth back into First Nations communities for economic justice and self-determination. 

Tish is the founder of Just Futures Collab, an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island-led giving circle activating resources for climate justice.  

Based in Naarm/Melbourne, Tish is spirited about sharing culture and amplifying social inequality and the rights of First Nations people. With studies in Ocean Science, lived experiences in the mineral and exploration industry, Tish continues to be a part of grassroots organisations and plays a role in advocating for Torres Strait Island Climate Justice.

Collaboratively working with like-minded folks to shift the dial, Tish is a member of the Australian Museum Climate Solutions Centre Advisory Group, current Board Director for Divers for Climate, current Board member for AIME and She Changes Climate Australian Ambassador.

Dr Kirsten Haydon investigates the potential of gold and silversmithing to communicate human experience and connections with the environment. Haydon travelled to Antarctica as a New Zealand Antarctic Arts Fellow in 2004 and later completed a PhD in 2009 with research centred on Antarctica. Her art practice continues to craft and explore connections and observations of the environment through concepts of historic photography and micromosaics. Haydon has taught enamelling in the School of Art since 2002. Works that explore Antarctic themes are seen in public collections including Antarctica New Zealand, Te Papa, Museum of New Zealand, Auckland War Memorial Museum, New Zealand. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Ville de Cagnes-sur-Mer, France. The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the Dallas Museum in North America.

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