By —Kristin Mayer
Lita Albuquerque stepped off the C- 17 Globemaster military transport plane and into blinding whiteness. Welcome to Antarctica.
“She was just ecstatic,” said Sophie Pegrum, a documentary filmmaker who accompanied the Santa Monica earth artist on her Antarctica art installation in December. “She was beaming with a smile across her face.”
Albuquerque inhaled a breath of frozen and unpolluted air under a clear blue sky. Her eyes gazed hundreds of miles into the distance across a brilliant expanse of snow that reflected the unblocked sun.
“Where we were was completely magical,” Albuquerque said. “It’s a very profound experience to be in that purity of landscape, in the middle of sea ice surrounded by mountain ranges.”
Albuquerque, a local artist whose Tunisian childhood inspired her to create art linking the earth and sky, flew to Antarctica for a month with a team of scientists and artists to install her “Stellar Axis” project.
The team arranged fiberglass spheres into a pattern that reflected the arrangement of stars in the winter solstice sky. The royal blue orbs ranged in size from 10 inches to four feet, their relative diameter corresponding to the brightness of the star they represented.
Albuquerque frequently collaborates with astronomers and scientists to give her art a fundamental and accurate architecture underneath, Pegrum said.
“What really impresses me about Lita is that she’s an artist but she’s really concerned about the scientific validity of her work,” said Dr. Simon Balm, an astronomy professor at Santa Monica College.
Balm accompanied the team to Antarctica as a scientific advisor to calculate the exact map coordinates for the spheres.
“It was absolutely amazing to see those abstract numbers turn into a thing of beauty, an artistic thing,”Balm said.“I don’t think I’d seen science in that light before. She made science accessible.”
The National Science Foundation funded the trip to Antarctica.
Albuquerque is heading to the Arctic Circle at the opposite end of the earth in July to assess locations and conditions for a second installation.
The idea is to install star patterns on both poles then imagine a shaft of light streaming through the earth’s axis.
As the planet moves, stars appear to spiral clockwise on the South Pole and counterclockwise on the North Pole.With this spinning,the shaft of light would take the form of a double helix — the shape of a DNA strand — which Albuquerque explained as yet another connection between humans and their universe.
Pegrum called Albuquerque inspirational to the extreme, but Albuquerque doesn’t always acknowledge how compelling her art-work is to others.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 31, 2007. Read the original PDF.