Eight Antarctic Anecdotes

Janet Laurence

Janet Laurence is a leading contemporary artist whose practice explores the fragile and interconnected relationships between humanity and the natural world. Working across installation, photography, sculpture and glass, Laurence creates immersive environments that evoke both beauty and loss. Her work is deeply informed by ecological research and collaboration with scientists, positioning art as a space for reflection, care and ethical attention. Through layered materials and atmospheric compositions, Laurence invites viewers into contemplative encounters with environments under threat, asking us to reconsider our responsibilities to the living world.

Laurence’s breath-taking series Once Were Forests creates visceral waves of intense feeling, shaped by her research into ice climates and glacial ecologies. As the artist reflects, “All these glacial experiences live with me.” Having visited places such as Antarctica and Iceland, Laurence brings a profound sense of gravitas to the heart of these beautiful, layered works. The compositions reflect our shared urgency in the face of environmental change, offering an enfolding testimony that is both intimate and confronting. Few can resist their quiet power; we are compelled not to look away.

Laurence is represented by ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne.

Dr Annalise Rees

Dr Annalise Rees is a Tasmanian based visual artist focusing on place-based research. Working in the expanded field of drawing, Rees’ interests span terrestrial and marine contexts. Her practice foregrounds manual drawing as a form of contemporary wayfinding, informed by historical practices of exploration, navigation and cartography.

Rees’ creative practice has involved exhibiting, teaching, research and curation, working in museums and galleries, universities, schools and community. She has participated in numerous residency programs nationally and internationally, often working with people outside of the visual arts. This has included collaborations with marine scientists, choreographers, architects, writers, professional fishers, social scientists, medical professionals and cartographers.

Her curiosity about people and place, and particularly Antarctica and the Southern Ocean has steered her into her current position as Assistant Director of Arts and Education Engagement for the Australian Antarctic Program, where she is responsible for managing the Antarctic Arts Fellowship.

Dr Carolyn Philpott

Dr Carolyn Philpott is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Tasmania’s Conservatorium of Music and Adjunct Senior Researcher at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS). Her research examines intersections between music, sound, place and the environment, especially in relation to Australia and Antarctica. She has published in top journals and books in fields as diverse as musicology, sound studies, polar studies, history, literary studies and tourism. She is author of Composing Australia, lead editor of Performing Ice, and a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council-funded project Creative Antarctica: Australian Artists and Writers in the Far South. She has visited Antarctica multiple times as a researcher and is currently writing a monograph on the region’s representation in music for Bloomsbury Academic.

Martin Walch

Martin Walch is an artist from lutruwita / Tasmanian who lives and works in nipaluna / Hobart. Walch works across a range of media including photography, video, sound, computer programming and data visualisation. He currently holds a position as an Adjunct Researcher at The University of Tasmania.

Walch was a member of the Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, 2002–2005, and winner of the Hobart City Art Prize 2008. Walch has been a CI on two Australian Research Council Discovery Grants; The Derwent Project from 2014 to 2016, and Creative Antarctica from 2022 to 2025. He was the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship for 2017/18.

Walch is represented in public and private collections including the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra; The National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Institute for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, Nevada.

Dr Sean Williams

Dr Sean Williams, an award-winning, #1 New York Times-bestselling author and composer, travelled to Casey station in 2017 as that year’s recipient of the Australian Antarctic Division Arts Fellowship. His creative responses to the environment, culture and history of Australian research into Antarctica include several short literary works and a four-hour soundscape, with a novel and a novella currently in production. He lives on Kaurna land in South Australia and teaches Creative Writing at Flinders University.

Dr Miranda Nieboer

Dr Miranda Nieboer is a creative practitioner, interdisciplinary researcher, and architect whose work explores Antarctic inhabitation, logistics, and perception across spatial practice, field experience, and cultural research. Her work is grounded in long-term engagement with extreme environments, including an Antarctic logistical traverse, where questions of labour, care, and infrastructure become inseparable from lived experience.

Nieboer’s research and creative practice examine how Antarctica is inhabited through movement, machines, sound, and attention, rather than buildings alone. Her work operates at the intersection of Antarctic humanities, creative practice, and spatial design foregrounding embodied and sensory knowledge in extreme environments.

Her multimedia installation presented as part of the Creative Antarctica exhibition draws on her traverse to Concordia Station, combining opposing video perspectives and sound to reflect on perception, repetition, and the intimate realities of Antarctic logistical work.

Elizabeth Leane

Elizabeth Leane is Professor of Antarctic Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania. She has a career-long drive to understand how non-specialists can connect with remote or seemingly inaccessible places and ideas. With degrees in both science and literature, she uses the insights of the humanities to understand how humans relate to the Antarctic, the 'continent for science'. She has visited Antarctica as a writer-in-residence, an educator and a researcher, with the Australian, New Zealand and Chilean national programs, and with tour operators. She is Arts and Literature Editor of The Polar Journal. Her books include Antarctica in Fiction, Performing Ice, Anthropocene Antarctica, South Pole: Nature and Culture and Space, Place, and Bestsellers.

Branwell Roberts

Branwell Roberts is a poet working towards a creative writing PhD at the University of Tasmania. They are working on a collection of poems about Antarctic history covering three expeditions of the “Heroic Age” of Exploration (1897-1922). Roberts’ work reconsiders heroism and Antarctica, and their research combines in-depth archival research with first-hand experience of the continent. They are the recipient of a 2026 NLA scholarship to further their research into the role of reading, creativity and poetry on early twentieth-century Antarctic expeditions. Roberts’ work explores the relationships between humans and Antarctica; mind and body; past and present, and the ways in which these concepts interweave.