Editor’s Note: This is the third post in Part IV of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series edited by Isabelle Gapp and guest edited by Jonathan Peyton.
Artist Statement:
In 2011, I graduated from OCAD University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography. My award-winning thesis, Terra Nova, explored a series of fictionalized land- and sea-scapes.
Terra Nova (2011) is a series of photographic prints toned with varnish and tea; meant to resemble aerial views of the polar seas. My references included satellite imagery of shattered ice floes, early photography, historical narratives of doomed polar expeditions, and the broader colonial project of trans-oceanic exploration.
Since then, the series has taken on a new meaning through the effects of climate change. Terra Nova now carries a darker warning: that of a new earth.
In 2020, I photographed a revised series of images based on my original subject matter. Terra Nova (2020) more specifically references rising sea levels prompted by melting glaciers and polar sea ice.
Each image sits on a dark field, suggesting a perilous, dizzying view from above, or perhaps the view from a porthole (or, perhaps, a portal). Drawing the viewer in, Terra Nova (2020) invites us to consider the consequences of our changing earth.
While both versions of Terra Nova appear to have been shot on a monumental scale, my technique is much more domestic. Each image documents the surface of a cup of tea made with hard tap water. As the tea cools, a malleable skin develops—a skin that flakes and cracks when disturbed, creating fissures that resemble calving ice seen from above; perhaps by a passing satellite. These effects play out on micro and macro levels, in a timely reminder of the influence of humans on our broader world.
– Anna Soper
Interview:
IG/JP: Looking back to 2011, I wonder if you could reflect more on what it was that led you to creating the first iteration of Terra Nova and perhaps how the 2020 revised series visually compares/contrasts?
AS: I knew I wanted to make a body of work that wasn’t immediately placeable. I wanted to play with the viewer’s sense of space and vision. I wanted to make something that felt esoteric. I also wanted to work with a subject matter grounded in the histories of science, photography, and polar exploration.
I was intrigued by a phenomenon I’d noticed a couple of years earlier, when I was living in London in 2009. Our flat had hard water, and I noticed that when I made a cup of tea, a filmy residue would form on the surface. When I’d remove the teabag, that skin would fracture into shards that resembled miniature seascapes. In these small vistas, I saw vast rivers, ice floes, and glaciers. I remember taking a few photos with my point-and-shoot camera. I didn’t know it, but these were early process shots. On the flight back to Canada in December 2009, I had a window seat. The low, midwinter light bounced off a river far below us on the Welsh coastline. I took another photo. These images were still playing in my mind less than a year later when I was planning my BFA thesis.
Once I settled on my subject matter, my thesis advisors encouraged me to research the scientific principles behind this phenomenon. To start, I sent emails to tea manufacturers. I learned that the industry term for this residue is “tea scum”, and I received an apologetic response from one representative with advice on how to minimize tea scum when making a cup of tea. (That was actually not the advice I wanted at the time, as I was specifically trying to make scummy tea for my photographs!).
I found that black tea and green teas made the best tea scum, and I loved the petrol-blue sheen that developed as the scum formed. It photographed well. My process for both versions of this series (2011 and 2020) was to set up my photography equipment, make a cup of tea, then begin taking photographs once the tea was cool (otherwise the lens would fog, and the steam would get in my way). I’d shoot a few frames, then remove the bag, take a few more shots, then stir the water’s surface with my fingertip, breaking the skin down as I went, and forming new patterns. In 2011, I printed these images using a large-format black-and-white laser printer at OCAD’s design school. Then I stained the prints with varnish, salt, and (of course) tea; the way you do when you’re a kid and you’re making a map for buried treasure. I folded a few of the prints like maps, bound some with twine and rubbed away the toner with my fingers. I named the series Terra Nova after the ship used in Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910-1913 British Antarctic Expedition, but also because the Latin translates to “new earth”, which seemed appropriate for a series of made-up landscapes.
In 2011, I won the OCAD University Medal and the Canon Canada Prize for Terra Nova, which I’ve exhibited in Toronto and Kingston, Ontario.
In January 2020, I decided to rephotograph Terra Nova, making use of the circular form of the teacup as a framing device. This was a different approach from the 2011 series, where I mostly cropped my photographs into a landscape format. I haven’t yet exhibited these images, but I could see them working quite well in a gallery as backlit transparencies framed in lightboxes.
IG/JP: We don’t necessarily immediately think of sea ice and sea level rise in the context of Arctic extraction, I’m wondering if you might explain a bit more your thinking around how climate change has shaped your work?
AS: When I rephotographed the series in January 2020, I did so specifically with climate change in mind. Thinking back to 2010 and 2011, I don’t even recall whether any of my classmates or professors mentioned climate change during our critiques. I don’t believe I thought of this body of work in that context. I was much more focused on the histories I was working with, and the narratives and worlds I was exploring.
By 2020, that changed. I couldn’t imagine making a series like this now and not acknowledging rising sea temperatures, calving ice sheets, melting glaciers, the displacement of wildlife, and the effects on humans and our societies and cultural practices.
It’s interesting that it only took a decade for the first series to shift from something I had framed as fictional to something more timely. What happened in that decade? (What didn’t happen in that decade?)
IG/JP: There’s something about the lense-like framing of your photographs that as you say recalls looking through a porthole and is particularly effective. They also remind us a lot of lantern slides! Given the role ships have historically played and continue to play in polar exploration, and the rise in ship-based artist residencies, if you can discuss your artistic process?
AS: I love the comparison with lantern slides! A few years ago, I worked with an archival collection of lantern slides used in Ontario schools in the 1920s, so this is a particularly astute connection.
Ships are an interesting motif here. As the daughter of a sailmaker, I grew up around boats. We had a small clinker-built sailboat, and since my dad made and repaired sails for the local tall ship—the St. Lawrence II, designed by my great-uncle—we occasionally joined day sails around Kingston with the SLII and her crew. On weekends, I tagged along when my dad’s customers brought him to their boats for consultations. At one point, he made a set of sails for a barge owned by a sailing theatrical troupe, and I recall seeing at least one of their performances with the ship moored in Kingston’s dry dock. He kept maritime prints and paintings in the house, and navigational charts of Kingston’s waterways on the walls of his loft. He also made some of the sails in Peter Weir’s film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003).
I’m not particularly “shippy” now, but it runs in the family. My aunt retired to Canada from Shropshire a few years ago, and has since made three birch bark canoes using only foraged materials and hand tools. One of my cousins sailed on the St. Lawrence II as a crew member, and is now a naval engineer. This family trait undoubtedly influenced Terra Nova.
IG/JP: Perhaps you could also elaborate on how you see Terra Nova fitting within your own body of work and that of Arctic visual culture more broadly?
AS: I often explore the history of science in my work, particularly the use of photography in the visual culture of science. Terra Nova was inspired by 19th century photography, including August Strindberg’s experimental, camera-less “celestographs”, which he erroneously believed were true-to-life images of deep space.1 There was a sense of failure in Strindberg’s photography, and also a sense of misadventure and misapprehension. I was drawn to that.
Similarly, I was inspired by photographs of ill-fated polar expeditions, especially those made by Frank Hurley during Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-17). I mimicked the formal qualities of these images in Terra Nova, but there was also sense of futility, frailty and the sublime that I wanted to evoke, too.
During my initial research in 2010 and 2011, I borrowed several books from OCAD’s library, including Roald Nasgaard’s The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890-1940; Russell A. Potter’s Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818-1875; and Canada and the Idea of North by Sherrill Grace.2
I am cautious to situate Terra Nova as a work that contributes to a visual culture of the Canadian Arctic—partly because climate change is a global phenomenon, and because my research explored northern and southern polar regions, but also because I am part of a community of southern Canadian and settler voices that Sherrill Grace rightly de-centres in favour of northern perspectives of Canada’s north.
IG/JP: Homing in a bit more on the specific characteristics of Terra Nova, I’m really struck by your choice of materiality, how the choice of tea with hard water specifically is in itself materially complex, and wonder if you could speak more to why you chose to work with tea?
AS: I recognize that my choice of tea as a subject matter is inherently linked with the history of the British Empire in South Asia, but since the tea scum’s mimicry of ice and glaciers suggested earth’s polar regions, far from the mild climates where black and green teas are cultivated, I left that history unexplored. To be honest, if Gatorade did the same thing, I’d have photographed Gatorade! As you say, it was the materiality of the tea I was focused on, not its botanical and political histories.
Using two kinds of tea (Camellia sinensis) yielded different results. The black tea, steeped for ten or more minutes, darkened to a chestnut colour that offset the tea skin really well. Green tea, also steeped beyond palatability, turned a deep grassy colour, and I found that its skin shimmered with a pleasing iridescence. In the 2020 series, I brewed the tea in a white ceramic cup, but I recall using mugs and bowls with a dark glaze during the first iteration in Toronto in 2010 and 2011. Fortunately, the tap water is hard in London, Toronto, and Kingston, so I’ve been able to photograph this phenomenon in all three cities. London’s was probably the best though. Or the worst, depending on whether you’re drinking the tea or photographing it!
Notes
1 Douglas Feuk, “The Celestographs of August Strindberg,” trans. Birgitta Danielsson, Cabinet, Summer 2001, https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/3/feuk.php./3/feuk.php
2 Grace, Sherrill. 2002. Canada and the Idea of North. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press; Nasgaard, Roald, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Cincinnati Art Museum. 1984. The Mystic North : Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890-1940. Toronto: Published in association with the Art Gallery of Ontario by University of Toronto Press; Potter, Russell A. 2007. Arctic Spectacles : The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818-1875. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Feature image: Terra Nova, 2020. © Anna Soper
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