This time last year, the phrases self-isolation and social-distancing had just started to pepper our language as a global pandemic took hold. At the Polar Museum, we were looking ahead to an exciting centenary year, and a vibrant programme of exhibitions featuring work by artists who specialise in the polar regions, together with some of the remarkable material in our collections.

The Big Freeze festival, and this online exhibition, is our way of sharing some of that fantastic work. I hope you enjoy exploring at least as much as I enjoyed putting the exhibition together.

Charlotte Connelly

Museum Curator, The Polar Museum at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge

The ice in the Arctic and Antarctic ebbs and flows with the seasons. It builds up in the winter months, and as it melts in the summer months it disperses fresh water into the ocean. This annual injection of cold, dense freshwater is part of the engine powering the world's ocean currents, and is just one of a number of cyclical patterns observed by our artists.

Kat Austen's work, The Matter of the Soul, explores human empathy with the process of dispersal in the Arctic. Pictured below are sculptural elements of the work. On the right, is a cassette player with headphones where visitors are invited to immerse themselves in musical elements of the work.

In the series Death of a Landscape, Lucy Carty approaches coastal scenes from the Antarctic peninsula as if they were lives coming to an end and explores the cyclical nature of creation and destruction - of accumulation and loss - using reincarnation and mass balance as a frame of reference. The transience and ultimate fragility of these powerful, overwhelming landscapes is at the core of her work.

In this series, Lucy took landscapes she had photographed and sketched in Antarctica and approached each one as a closed system. Once the initial scenes were laid down in pastel and encaustic wax, nothing else entered or left the work - no extra paint, no scraping away. The act of then melting each one with the heat gun and the blowtorch led to entirely new works, despite them being made of the same, original material. The results are ghosts, memories of the landscapes gone before.

At the heart of the Arctic circle is the polar sea, and unsurprisingly the sea and sea ice have been central to work by a number of our artists.

Lesley Burr's Windblown was made in her studio in Lochgilphead, using sketches and photo footage recorded in 2019 on board CV Resolute. "The painting is part of a series of new oils depicting the movement of the ice, diminishing ice and the sense of spaciousness experienced in arctic landscape."

Nicholas Jones found inspiration in the icebergs he encountered on his time in the Arctic. "I find icebergs extraordinarily beautiful and moving to look at. They seem so composed, dignified, and otherworldly; utterly at ease and wonderfully responsive to the changing light and sky and sea. In our rapidly heating world, they also speak poignantly of immense forces that are often so very hard for us to grasp and comprehend."

Julian Grater spent the early part of 2020 in Greenland making a number of portraits of Greenlandic Inuit. His work depicts people from a range of backgrounds, from fellow artists and craftspeople, to representatives of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, educational consultants and advisors, truck drivers, hunters and fishermen.

Julian's work is reminiscent of some of the portraiture in the Polar Museum's collection. The most striking similarity is with Isobel Wylie Hutchison's piece, Regina, a grandmother of Greenland, made in the early 20th century and sharing the same deliberate stare out of frame.

Zsuzsanna Ardó's Polar self Portrait project invited artists from all over the world to imagine themselves at the North Pole and make a self portrait as if they were there. Of her own self portrait, and the experience that led her to it, she writes:

Christine Finn also produces a self-portrait, this time in words and images. In her spoken narrative she reflects on her time in the North, and her current pandemic-enforced stillness in her current home in Paris.

Each of the artworks in this section is made by a former Friends of SPRI Antarctic Artists in Residence. The residency takes place on board the Royal Navy patrol ship, currently HMS Protector. Many of our artists remark that there's a particular challenge in capturing the Antarctic coastline on a moving ship, before it slips away.

Emma Stibbon and Nicholas Romeril both offer powerful interpretations of the coastlines they encountered. Emma comments, "I made Ice Cloud, Antarctica in response to the pristine snowfields and atmospheric effects of the Antarctic Peninsula. I printed the dark mountain and then added watercolour washes to suggest the softer sky and snow areas. I left the paper white to suggest the cloud hanging off the peak." While Nicholas Romeril remarks, "One of the most remarkable and deceptive visual illusions of the Antarctic is the scale. In A Blue Berg, the small blue berg floating in front of the glacier is the size of a three storey building. The glacier is about 1000 meters high."

Dafila Scott's Shimmering Iceberg is contrasted against a strongly colourful backdrop. For many of the artists who visit Antarctica, the richness and depth of the colours they encounter in nature is a pleasant surprise.

Andrew Lansley had imagined himself in colder climes for some time before his residency. "Even before I knew I was going to Antarctica, I had started painting pictures of ice. Mostly marine paintings concerning the weather, and by coincidence I seem to have found myself visiting places that chimed with the shipping forecast. And so, like all great journeys, this started out initially as a journey of the mind... First Ice was painted before my journey, and exactly matched my first sighting of the ice when we emerged on the southern side of the Drake’s Passage. It is a meeting of fact and fantasy. The fact won me over, but the fantasy was the inspiration that got me there."

Since 1959 Antarctica and the surrounding seas have been protected by the Antarctic Treaty. The Treaty was signed on 1 December 1959 by twelve nations that were active on the continent, and who agreed to maintain Antarctica as a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science. In the decades since then, many more nations have joined, and many more protective conservation protocols have been added. The Antarctic Treaty System helps to conserve the seas around Antarctica as well as the continent itself, making Antarctic waters a haven for wildlife.

Darren Rees's study of a king penguin gives us a glimpse of one of Antarctica's best loved inhabitants. Their habitats in Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic regions is protected by the Antarctic Treaty.

The Treaty encourages international collaboration, which in turn makes it possible for organisations like the Scott Polar Research Institute to do their work effectively and for international agreements to be reached that protect wildlife. Collaboration continues to be one of the most powerful tools we have in the polar regions.