Place made
Adelaide
Medium
Cotton embroidery; early-20th-century Australian carved wooden frame.
Dimensions
15.2 cm (diam.) (image)
33.3 cm (diam.) (frame)
Credit line
South Australian Government Grant 1990
Accession number
906A40A
Signature and date
Signed and dated reverse frame, top c, fibre-tipped pen 'Narelle Jubelin 1988/"An Ice mask on a meteorologist"'
Media category
Textile
Collection area
Australian decorative arts and design
Copyright
© Narelle Jubelin/Courtesy The Commercial, Sydney

  • Antarctica: five responses from the collection, 2020-2021



    Narelle Jubelin’s series Second glance at the coming man re-examines Australia’s historical mythologies of conquest, drawing attention to the absence of women in these narratives. She created the work in 1988 while on residency at the South Australian School of Art. Following a visit to the South Australian Museum, she was struck by the contrast between the heroic accounts of Douglas Mawson’s expedition to Antarctica in 1911–14 and the intimate objects worn by the explorer and his team, including a woollen balaclava and socks (presumably knitted by women). Using the petit-point technique to re-create Frank Hurley’s photograph of Mawson, Jubelin places her embroidery in found frames, elaborately carved by anonymous women from the 1920s and 1930s.

     

    Maria Zagala, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs

  • Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, 1990

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 2 March 1990 – 22 April 1990
  • Antarctica: Five responses

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 5 December 2020 – 26 April 2021
  • The extreme climate of Nicholas Folland

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 19 July 2014 – 1 February 2015