Peninsular

In the time of waiting, with nothing to be done, Gould made a few drawings of her dying father lying against the white expanse of the bed sheets. Still mourning as the third anniversary of his death approached, she resolved to undertake a journey to one of the most remote and least human places in the world; the Antarctic Peninsula. She took the drawings of him with her, and set them out, there, amongst the penguins and ice and the white expanse of glaciers.

In 'Peninsular' Gould explores mourning, melancholia, and the romantic theme of the artist’s lonely journey into awesome and sublime nature, through video, photography and drawing made during her trip to the Antarctic.

Polly Gould

Research Interests

Landscape and the sublime
Contemporary fine art
Drawing
Performance and narratives
Public art and remembrance
Mourning and Melancholia in the arts
Relating theory to practice and the visual to the verbal.
Antarctica
Death
Representations of nature

Current Research

I work with drawing, sound, video and performance. I combine drawing and writing in installation works that also examine the narrative urge in our lives; the things we say to each other, the way we end up quoting favourite books, living our lives like scenes from films, or finding the words of a popular song to do our talking for us. I explore the 'writing oneself backwards' of autobiography and the work of memory. My work is concerned with our relationships as speaking subjects exploring questions of voice, power and desire, and presented in a live form as performance lectures of performance video works. I was short-listed for Jerwood Drawing Prize 2007, and had my short story included in The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B, a collection of fiction by contemporary British artists, in 2006.
I also collaborate with Anne Eggebert as Eggebert and Gould. We work on public art commissions, site-specific works and exhibition curation. We engage with the history and architecture of a place in order to uncover forgotten stories. We are currently researching Landscape and Anxiety in contemporary fine art practice with the view to developing a touring exhibition. We are interested in sustainability, representations of nature and landscape, and cross-disciplinary collaborations.