Ice and Imagination
20 May 2026 at 10:00:00
Winston Churchill Hall, Ruislip
Sledging by Edward Wilson - detail, 1902
Exploration art was rarely neutral. It raised funds before departure, illustrated books to clear expedition debts, and burnished reputations. The notion of the expedition artist as detached observer is itself a polar myth. Today's lecture sets scientific record-making against narrative painting, scientific photography against staged imagery, still images against the flicker of early film.
We will then shift the vantage point from the men on the Ice to the women at home – the wives, the mothers, the fiancées. They were not looking for picturesque sunsets or sublime compositions, they wanted the truth: the tilt of a tent in the wind, the look of frostbite on a cheek, the size of a sledge against the emptiness. The more precisely Antarctica was rendered, the nearer they could feel to the men they loved. What did those images mean to them? And what does Antarctica mean to us now?
Katherine MacInnes (MSt Oxford University, MA Hons St Andrews) is a public speaker and the non-fiction author of Snow Widows – Scott’s Fatal Antarctic Expedition Through the Eyes of the Women They Left Behind (HarperCollins 2022) and Woman with the Iceberg Eyes: Oriana F. Wilson (History Press 2019). Writing as Kate Nicholson, she published Behind Everest: Ruth Mallory’s Story (Pen & Sword, 2024), which was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Mountain Literature Award. Katherine first started researching polar history when her husband climbed Everest in 2006 and her children were 10 months, 3 and 5. She looked to history and found inspiration from the invisible women – mothers, wives, widows – throughout exploration’s history.
Katherine has been shortlisted for the Biographer’s Prize and is a sought after public speaker on polar history around the globe, from Norway to the Royal Geographical Society. She is currently penning The Shortest History of Antarctica for Old Street Publishing’s Shortest History series, with publication due later this year.
Katherine MacInnes