Talk - Chris Drury. Heartbeats of the Earth. A journey through art, science and nature; from Sussex to Antarctica.

I’ve been talking to internationally renowned land artist and Lewes resident Chris Drury about cloud-igloos. “Are they made of cloud, then?” I ask. “No! They are igloos with the roof left off so you can see the clouds” he tells me, laughing. Chris recently came back from a two-month residency in Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey, working alongside scientists looking at the effects of climate change on the ice caps. After watching a programme about how Inuits build igloos, Chris and colleague made one out of compacted snow, using a woodsaw. “You need a quarry of sorts to cut the blocks from. The first block needs to be triangular, and then you build a spiral, with each block leaning in a bit. They ‘glue’ together quite easily. You need one person inside, and one outside, to fit them in the right places”. Because of the extreme weather, and the dangerous environment, a lot of time was spent in the base, which he refers to as a “boarding school on ice”. He described the sharp contrast between the institutionalised internal world of the base, where a hundred people got on each other’s nerves, and the external world, in which “I felt very emotional” he told me. “It’s so beautiful, it makes you cry. I didn’t expect that”. Neither did he expect the 6ft bearded French chef to dress up in twin-set and pearls and deliver the Queen’s speech in a Peter Seller’s accent, which is what happened on Christmas day. EC