The past, in other words, is always contained in the present, not as its cause or its pattern but rather as its latency, its virtuality, its potential for being otherwise.
Elizabeth Grosz, (2000), ‘Histories of the Feminist Future’, Signs, 25:4, pp. 1017-21, p. 1020.

Penguins are undoubtedly old-fashioned in their appearance, but their looks are nothing like so old-fashioned as their history. They are really some of the most primitive behind-hand birds in existence.
Edward Wilson, ‘Some remarks on Penguins’, The South Polar Times, Vol. 1, April to August 1902, (London: Smith, Elder, & Co. 1907), pp. 3-9, p. 3.

Penguin Pool plays on the pun of ‘pool’ as an entertaining architectural design for zoological display and gene pool, which fits the more recent conception of the zoo as a place for conservation of endangered species. Penguin Pool is a performative lecture modeled on the Edwardian magic lantern show as a vehicle for disseminating the geographical explorer’s tales. It begins with a slide of the penguins in the iconic 1934 design by Lubetkin (1901-1990) for the penguin pond at London Zoo, and ‘Some Remarks on Penguins,’ written for a lecture by the explorer Edward Wilson (1872-1912) during the Discovery expedition to Antarctica prepared in 1902. The work uses forty-six lantern-slides- the same as the number of chromosomes in the human genome – assembled by my efforts as an E-bay buyer, chosen to fit my current interests. Sometimes what is depicted has been forgotten, or is beyond recognition. These individual lantern images are uprooted from their initial narrative contexts and associated with this new one by linking them to a quotation. The audience was asked on their arrival to select from the display in the entrance hall a card on which one of the lantern images was printed. Each person had unwittingly become responsible for the quote on the reverse of the card that they would later be asked to read out aloud. Unselected cards meant unspoken citations during the performance. If the audience numbers were less than 46 there would not be enough people to perform the full text and the gaps of silence would be heard. For a species to survive its numbers must not go below an optimum number of individuals. It entailed a group effort to perform the narrative contained in the lantern-slide sequence. 

I work as an artist and writer working on inter and transdisciplinary approaches to the histories and practices of observation in art and science, situated in broader cultural and historical contexts. I am interested in methodological inventiveness in order to address how matter and meaning coalesce in specific examples of artefacts, art works and material culture. In my work storytelling plays a strong part, either with performances that narrate the artworks in some way, or in the fictions and histories that inform the works. In collaboration with Anne Eggebert I have curated and produced the national touring Arts Council funded shows, Nature and Nation: Vaster than Empires, 2003, and  TOPOPHOBIA: Fear of Place in Contemporary Art, 2012 http://topophobia.arts.ac.uk/. I studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, and have undertaken both Fine Art and Theory residencies at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, Netherlands. I completed a PhD in Art and Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London under the primary supervision of Prof Jane Rendell and secondary supervision of Prof Victor Buchli. During that time I participated in the Critical Spatial Practice: Site-writing module as a participant in 2012 and subsequently as a critic and tutor, as well as supporting curated forms coming out of the module for a number of public exhibitions of participants site-writing practices. The topic of my PhD has now been developed as a monograph titled Antarctica through Art and the Archive: the Polar Expeditions of Edward Wilson, Bloomsbury, 2019. From 2016 to 2019 I have been Post-doctoral Research Fellow in Design-led Architectural Research with ARC Architecture Research Collaborative, Newcastle University. https://www.ncl.ac.uk/apl/staff/profile/pollygould.html. I show with Danielle Arnaud in London http://www.daniellearnaud.com/artists/artists-gould.html.

I had long been interested in making writing that related to and with other practices in a non-hierarchical relation, so that the one is not interpretive and the other interpreted, but both are considered as parallel practices. I wanted to work with Jane as my PhD supervisor as I admired the way that site-writing engaged with the situated and embodied presence of the critic, and their relation to the site and the text. In my writing I have adopted a spatial manoeuvre of Entstelling or distortion from Freud’s dream analysis, along with the chiastic literary pattern to write about archives of Antarctic exploration.

architecture: Berthold Lubetkin (1901-1990), and Tecton Group 1934, The Penguin Pool at London Zoo, London, England. Reinforced concrete. film: László Moholy-Nagy, film, ‘The New Architecture of the London Zoo’, 1936, 16mm, b&w, silent/1S/ 15’30” book: Rosi Braidotti, (2006), Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, (Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA.)