Eleanor Scicchitano
“Antarctica: convergence and compilations”

Edwina Cooper is an artist who has long been fascinated by water worlds and edges, the sense of human inferiority and the feeling of awe that often accompanies immersion in these spaces. This fascination is something that has drawn us together, myself a curator interested in the potential of edges as spaces of transition and flux. We have shared tea and stories, wine and commiserations and it was over one such afternoon that we first began discussing her project Antarctica: convergence and compilations. One of the stories we shared was the story of lace.

It is a love story between a young couple. He is a sailor and she is a seamstress, and they live in Venice, a city built on edges. He is soon to board a ship for work, and he will be away for a long time. As a token of his affection, and a promise of love, he reaches into the water and picks for her the most beautiful piece of seaweed he can find. This is a treasure from the sea that she holds dear to her heart. A reminder. But soon after he leaves the seaweed begins to dry, wither and fade. It becomes brittle. Wanting to preserve the plant, she takes silk thread and begins to stitch the outline of the plant, capturing the holes and crinkled edges, the delicate curves of the plant. And thus, the first piece of lace was made, in the image of both nature and of love.

Antarctica: convergence and compilations is part love letter, part research project, part herald and part act of translation and transcription. Across a year-long research project, Cooper has spent time with the scientists who regularly visit Antarctica as part of the Australian Antarctic Program, measuring and tracking changes in sea ice and glaciers that occur over the passage of time. Antarctica is a place she has been unable to visit herself (and she is unsure if she ever should), however, it is a place of immense interest to the artist, as it is the epitome of inhospitable periphery / edge space. It is also at this boundary where important climate research is occurring. Using warm data practices, she translates the information through stitching, drawing, images and text, sharing her studio process to the gallery wall. Like the Venetian woman, Cooper is trying to fix and make permanent an edge that is ever changing, shifting, and to capture not just the hard data but the warm impressions, stories and intuitions of the scientists. In this work she brings these findings ashore and asks us to consider our connections to this foreign water-y place, and our distant though significant impact upon it.

The installation is comprised of materials many will recognise as those of Cooper’s visual language; sailcloth, knots, stitching and text. They are drawn from her experiences as a sailor, a state that continues to inspire her arts practice and her interest in water spaces as environmental markers. Spending time on the water has led to a lifelong interest in the ocean’s edges - what happens at this boundary, the way phenomena are magnified, how the environment is most vulnerable here, and the way that spending time at these edges shapes us. These are transitional spaces, where change is often more reflexive and noticeable than at the centre. These are spaces where two ideas / continents / margins bump up against each other, rubbing at the edges, shaping the boundaries and reshaping them as time goes on. At these edges, changes in the environment are tracked, marked and noted.

Centred in Antarctica: convergence and compilations, is a map of Antarctica, made of strong but almost translucent sailcloth. Cooper has worked the edges in delicate French knots, a time-consuming embroidery stitch, requiring a steady tension be applied when it is worked. The knots cluster and bunch, forming an uneven surface reminiscent of pancake ice, an example of the same ice that forms at the edges of this continent and bumps across itself. Here, Cooper has used them to mark out and fill in glaciers and sea ice concentrations. An ever-changing border around the continent. Much like the stitches the young Venetian woman used to make, track and capture the seaweed, Cooper’s choice of medium is time consuming and, by the time she has finished working this map, the sea ice she has captured will have already melted and changed.

This map is overlaid over another one, mapping the bounds of Antarctica’s sea ice concentration at a particular given time. Cooper continues this layering throughout her work, as she aims to co-opt the language of the scientific community to communicate a story of time, melting, and movement that is occurring on the edge of the Antarctic. That is what the scientists that Cooper has been speaking with are investigating. Unprecedented changes in ice formations are an early indicator for a number of significant climate change impacts. Here the shifting edge becomes a beacon, a warning of the realities of a harsh, inhospitable and unpredictable climate, further creeping towards the centre. Our (hospitable) centres included.

The scientists who track these changes do so predominantly through numbers, measurements and finely tuned instruments, but there is another way: through their unique lived experiences. Across the wall Cooper is attempting to tell a story, one that is often unseen, about what is happening at the edge of our world. She has gathered facts and figures from scientists with lived experience of these spaces, working closely with them to gather not just the ‘facts’ as they are known, but also their anecdotes, stories of the way a space feels and the tracking of changes that are felt not measured. These stories are laid out over a bed of blue, floating amongst the ocean that Cooper so lovingly occupies. They are connected by words, images, impressions, laid over the top of each other creating connections, links and drawing out that which feeds into and across. Cooper extends her map beyond the bounds of her ice knots, beyond the bounds of the sailcloth shelf ice beneath and out across the ocean. The time that Cooper spends with this information, both the personal stories, the gently knotted stitching and the anecdotal stories of the researchers, she is able to capture not only the numbers but the sentiment and feeling behind these voyages. It echoes the urgency to which we should pay attention to both the data and the stories.

Each of these characterise the translation that she practices. Across the gallery wall Cooper is attempting to quantify the invisible, to track the distant changes and then bring them ashore as a call to action. Like the Venetian women, each knot that she pulls fixes in place something that is rapidly changing and disappearing. And like the first piece of lace, the map that Cooper has created is made in the image of nature and love.

This essay was commissioned to accompany Antarctica: convergence and compilations in the West Space Window, 12 July → 16 August 2025.