OPENING PREVIEW | Friday, 31 October from 5pm

ARTIST TALK | Saturday, 1 November at 11am | Jane Ussher in conversation with Francesca Eathorne, Executive Director, Antarctic Heritage Trust

“A timewarp without parallel,” is how Sir David Attenborough described Scott’s last expedition base. “You approach a simple wooden building and upon entering it you are transported in time. Scott’s hut… is a simple weathered pale timber structure… it has stood for over a century. Upon entering the building’s annex… the first thing that strikes you is the smell – a combination of seal blubber and hay… As you turn the corner you are confronted by history – you are peering into the lives of the men of Scott’s last expedition. Crammed with over 8,000 objects, the interior of the building is covered in the soot of seal blubber… This truly is one of the birthplaces of Antarctic science. The further you walk into the building the more it reveals. Within the main building the hundreds upon hundreds of everyday objects from Edwardian Britain combine to impact your senses… The intricate details of the men’s existence are laid bare.”¹

Astonishingly, this exhibition STILL LIFE – Inside the Antarctic Hut of Robert Falcon Scott is Jane Ussher’s first solo exhibition of her internationally acclaimed photographs. Long acknowledged as one of New Zealand’s foremost portrait and documentary photographers, this quite astounding group of works was undertaken during a five-week period in the summer of 2008/09.

Bad weather worked to Jane Ussher’s advantage, allowing the initial schedule of five days to be extended to nine days, split between the huts of Scott and Shackleton. Even on an overcast day, Antarctica in midsummer is a bright, shadowless place. The glare off the snow and the vastness of the landscape were the first things which struck her when disembarking from the plane onto the ice. The huts, by contrast, were dark and oppressive. Ussher’s imagination was captured by the layers of detail that slowly began to emerge, by the items left behind. Dull soft colours, some created by weather and age, some by the seal blubber burnt to heat the huts and cook with. The fat darkened the walls and added to the bleak atmosphere. Nothing was straightforward in these conditions. Her technique of using long exposures, multiple frames per image with a digital Hasselblad was assisted by the windows being screened to soften the shadows thrown by the 24-hour-a-day sun. Shafts of light were bounced to illuminate parts of walls that were otherwise not visible to the human eye.²

The result – as this remarkable exhibition so clearly testifies – is a body of work without parallel in New Zealand photography and one which stands shoulder to shoulder with that of Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley.

1. Nigel Watson (essays), Jane Ussher (photography), Still Life: Inside the Antarctic Huts of Scott and Shackleton, Murdoch Books, 2010, p. 110.

2. Jane Ussher, Foreword, Still Life: Inside the Antarctic Huts of Scott and Shackleton, Murdoch Books, 2010, p. 16-17.

This project was realised with the generous support of the Antarctic Heritage Trust.