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Polar Time: a year in six minutes, one sunrise
2012

Screened at 'Suspended' Perth Cultural Centre public LCD screening, Perth.
Exhibited in 'Formal Intensity: Australian Art Today'
curated by Andy Best and Jessy for DFAT/Australian Embassy
Tsagaandarium Art gallery, 2012
An exhibition of leading Australian contemporary artists celebrating 40 years of formal diplomatic relations between Australia and Mongolia.

Polar Time is a six-minute video that recreates the behaviour of light and time at the South Pole, where the sun only rises once a year. It comprises a light-based video display in which 365 days and nights at the South Pole are compressed into 6 minutes. This work examines diurnal light and forms or experiences of planetary temporality that we don't ordinarily perceive. Its objective is to question the adequacy of contemporary regulations of time and their resemblance to efforts to organise human desire.

Ice constitutes over half the earth's body of water and yet it is in a constant state of change. The shifting dispersion of water is also having a direct effect on the length of each solar day, as the tidal drag of the moon on the increasing mass water slows down the precession of the earth on its axis. Like desire, ice is thus always on the edge of being in one form or another and in recent years melting polar ice has become a deeper part of a consciousness of our own fragility, as should time itself. The work includes a soundtrack of The Knife's 'This is now' (2004).