Change over time: Antarctic

In my work on the visualisation of time, I am above all interested in explicitly representing time graphically and spatially – as calendars, clocks and timelines do. But sometimes it is hard to resist appealing examples that implicitly represent time by showing change.

Nicholas Hutcheson has put online a series of short experiments using time-lapse drawings of the Antarctic Landscape. They can be viewed here in Vimeo.

Nicholas explains:

In 2008 I spent 8 weeks as an Artist in Residence for the Australian Antarctic Division drawing frantically as I journeyed in and around the continent. On my return, the challenge has been to try and capture some of the Antarctica I experienced.  Out there, you have a constant awareness of movement and time. Some of it is so slow - gigantic icesheets flowing towards the sea at seemingly imperceptible rates –  but then, you can also watch the sea water become ice, and weather fronts moving across the horizon.  And the majority of what makes up the landscape is frozen water. It’s defined by this ever-creeping whiteness – in compositional terms, a mass of negative space. How to deal with this in the drawings I was making?

At the start of the year, in response to this dilemma, I began to play with making very short animations, sort of time-lapse drawings of the landscape. 

A page about his drawings is here.