I Fear We Must Go by Tatiana Ginsberg

I Fear We Must Go was inspired by the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-13 and the five men, led by Robert Falcon Scott, who trekked to the South Pole but perished on the return trip. I first made an installation (of the same name) that consisted of large drawings based on the shadows of decaying leaves. This artist book follows the same method, but here the drawings (based on the same individual leaves) were done on limestone and printed as lithographs. The translucent interleaving text sheets, a mixture of kozo and gampi, contain phrases taken from the last letters Scott wrote. Though they lost their lives, Scott and his men made significant contributions to science. The rock specimens they collected contained fossilized plants, such as Glossopteris indica, which not only indicated that the frozen land once supported plant life but also provided proof that Antarctica was once joined to Australia, South America, Africa, and other land masses in a single super-continent, Gondwana.