Artist Ruth Watson’s ongoing preoccupation with cartography is based on the impact maps have on our understanding and physical sense of the world, and how they can reveal and conceal information about places or spaces we know, and significantly, those we do not know.  In a new body of work made for Two Rooms Gallery, Watson expands her interest in mapping, putting our perception of Antarctica under question.

Over the summer of 2010-11, Ruth Watson travelled to the ice as part of a science-based course run by Gateway Antarctica at the University of Canterbury, and became more interested in our position in relation to 2048, when the Antarctic Treaty comes up for review.

In the popular imagination, preconceptions of Antarctica include now-familiar scenes such as dramatic ice formations, penguins, people wrapped in extreme weather gear, melt pools, seals, or struggling explorers in blizzard conditions. However Watson’s exposure to glaciology, meteorology, ice physics, pollutant and contaminant studies, fish and bird physiology, had a strong impact on her, being shocked by some of the things she learnt from the course and keen to find ways to deal with this information. “We are encouraged to consider Antarctica an ‘untouched wilderness worthy of protection’, but will those values withstand the pressures of energy-intensive world populations, double that of the time when the Treaty was signed in 1959”, adding “so it might be good to consider a wider context for our Antarctiphilia”.

Ruth Watson’s new body of work for the downstairs gallery at Two Rooms includes sculptures alongside paintings and photography, none of it designed to ‘bring the continent closer’ to us as a familiar place, as expected of Antarctica artist residency programmes. Instead, Ruth takes an alternative view, questioning what we think we know about a place that most only a few will ever see in restricted locations, but the future of which will have an impact on everyone.

This is Ruth’s second exhibition in the large downstairs gallery at Two Rooms; the first being ‘Unsafe’, a large-scale floor-based installation in 2007. A suite of paintings, ‘Platforms’, was shown in the upstairs gallery in 2009.

Ruth Watson has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand, Australia, Europe and the United States. Watson has also had over 25 solo exhibitions and was included in the 1992 Sydney Biennale, the 1995 Cheju Korean Biennale, the first Auckland Triennale in 2001, and several representative exhibitions such as 2011’s ‘Unnerved: The New Zealand Project’ at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. Along with the success of Watson’s extensive exhibition history she has been the recipient of several awards, including the Olivia Spencer-Bower Foundation Award in 1992, a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council Fellowship in 1993, the international 2005 Ristow Prize in cartographic history for a study of the first map of the world to use the term ‘Terra Australis Incognita’. Watson’s artworks are represented in major public collections in New Zealand, including Te Papa Tongarewa and the Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.

Ruth Watson has a BFA in Painting from the University of Canterbury (1984), a MVA from Sydney College of the Arts (1999) and a PhD in Fine Arts from the Australian National University, Canberra (2005). She returned to NZ in 2006 to teach at the Elam School of Fine Arts.

Ruth Watson wishes to thank and gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Gateway Antarctica, Antarctica New Zealand, the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industry Faculty Research Development Fund, Don Goldschmidt, Arnold Heine (NZOM) and Dr Wendy Lawson at the University of Canterbury.

Press release courtesy Two Rooms.