‘POLES APART’

       Anne Lydiat and Chris Wainwright (1955 – 2017)

Review by Mark Walter

With the sea trying to devour the seawall and after a week of heavy storms I made my way to see an exhibition at the Hastings Art Forum gallery titled ‘POLES APART’. When I entered the gallery, I was confronted by an array of stunning photographs being eagerly studied by a keen and busy crowd. The exhibition was a collaboration between Anne Lydiat and her late husband Chris Wainright. The title comes from the fact that their Arctic and Antarctic photographs are literally ‘poles apart’.

‘Poles Apart’ tells the story of Anne’s journey to Antarctica in 2019 after her husband Chris’s death. She wanted to visit a place they hadn’t visited together and it was the first time she was to sail without him.

Her Antarctic voyage, the last one before the Antarctic winter set in, was on the Norwegian registered ship the MS MIDNATSOL - renamed the MS MAUD in 2021, along with 500 other excited passengers who were mainly on board to photograph the amazing wildlife.  Anne tells me “I chose a Hurtigruten ship due to their commitment to helping reduce the effects of climate change and to limiting the effects of unsustainable mass tourism as much as possible in this pristine landscape.” All human activity, including tourism in Antarctica, is controlled by the Antarctic Treaty. This means that there are a set of rules and regulations in place to manage tourism and to limit the environmental impact.

Anne flew firstly to Buenos Aires, Argentina and then to Ushuaia in the Tierra del Fuego province and the gateway to Antarctica. After crossing Drake Passage, the passengers first task was to vacuum every item of clothing they intended to wear whilst in Antarctica. They were all issued with a pair of rubber boots and a bright red waterproof with neon yellow hood so that the passengers could easily be spotted if they deviated from the red flagged pathways marked out at every destination.

Anne tells me “I intended to capture the essence and beauty of the Antarctic landscape as well as the absence of human existence in the abandoned research stations and the overriding sense of death and decay prevalent, especially in Whalers Bay where wooden structures rot next to the bones of whales”.

The ship visited many different points with great sounding names on its journey including Half Moon Island, Whalers Bay/ Deception Island, Brown Station, Damoy Point and finally the Arktowski Station the Polish all-year-round research facility and the site of the southernmost lighthouse at Port Thomas.

The other half of the ‘Poles Apart’ exhibition explores the Arctic photography of Anne's late husband Chris Wainright.  His work highlights how the once pristine, inaccessible landscape of the Arctic has been so affected by human take-over including coal mining, tourism and in his ‘Red Ice’ series, the more obvious effect of climate change.

Photographs include Chris in Disco Bay, West Greenland in 2008 while on board The Grigory Mikheev with David Buckland, Founder and International Director of Cape Farewell. “He stresses the urgency of a cultural response to climate change and believes musicians and artists in partnership with scientists can inspire new and original thinking, re-framing a wider public conversation around issues of climate responsibility, stewardship, and re-imaging a sustainable future”.

In 2011 Chris sailed with the University of Gothenburg, Sweden on the MS Stockholm exploring the waters around the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard organised by PolarQuest, who are known for sustainable tourism and nature conservation in the Arctic Regions.

Chris and Anne made several voyages together including to Longyearbyen in 2014 and finally in 2017 when they sailed around the coast of Svalbard on board the SS Langoysund to the abandoned Soviet coal mining settlement of Pyramiden which has now become a tourist destination, and to the still active Russian coal mining settlement at Barentsburg.