Michelle Schwengel-Regala

Mililani, Hawai‘i

“My wish: For people to look more closely at and care for nature.”

As a kid growing up in Wisconsin, my favorite books were field guides. Their combination of words and images helped me make sense of the world, and inspired me to learn more about the natural history of my home range as well as any place I visited. During college, I chose degree programs in Entomology and Wildlife Ecology, and often drew my subjects as a learning tool. A professor saw my drawings and offered me a job as a scientific illustrator in his taxonomy lab, setting me on a path to not just become a scientist, but to also be a science communicator. After fifteen years illustrating biology and medicine, I shifted into fine art, still keeping natural history stories at the core of my projects.

In 2017, I participated in the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program, which afforded me seven weeks at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. My project proposal was to SCUBA dive to explore the marine ecosystem, draw while underwater, then return to the studio to create artwork to connect people to this remote and extreme environment. My underwater field sketching–in a dry-suit, with three pairs of gloves, in 28-degree water, under seven feet of solid sea ice–was definitely the most extreme length I’ve gone to for SciArt, but also the most rewarding. The resultant artwork included a series of paper flags with metalpoint drawings serving as a “field guide to the super cool inhabitants of this supercooled habitat.”

Portal

The sculptures and drawings in Frozen, Floating offer windows into Michelle Schwengel-Regala’s expedition to McMurdo Station, Antarctica with the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program (NSF Award #1645127). These installations were originally created while Schwengel-Regala participated in the 2018 fishcake x Box Jelly Artist in Residence program in Honolulu, Hawai‘i

This knitted aluminum wire sculpture is a scale model of the portal in the sea ice Michelle traveled through to enter and exit the marine realm. At the beginning of each dive season, heavy equipmentoutfitted with a four-foot auger excavates a hole through seven feet of fast ice at each dive site. The holes are then surrounded by a shack to shelter divers and attendants from the outside elements.

Bubbles

Humans are not adapted to living underwater. With a history of asthma, Schwengel-Regala was unsure how her lungs would react to being submerged in such cold conditions. During her 33 dives she had to suspend her fears and push her limits. These knitted bubbles represent her breaths, her vital signs, her sighs of relief. The rising bubbles indicated which way was up, toward the lone hole in the ice through which she could return to the surface, to the land, to the realm of humans.

Name Location

Description

Michelle Schwengel-Regala

Mililani, Hawai‘i

Flags

Flags serve as means of communication. In and around McMurdo Station, swatches of fabric attached to bamboo poles convey crucial information: red or green flags trace safe paths across land or sea ice, blue flags highlight subnivean features (i.e. fuel lines), and black flags warn of danger. The durable bamboo poles became the equivalent of trees in this otherwise plantless landscape.

Red

In nature, red is often interpreted as an aposematic alert; in Antarctica it has more positive connotations, requiring that Michelle recalibrate her associations with the color. During one snowmobile outing across sea ice, conditions deteriorated to the point that the horizon was obscured by blowing snow, no geographical landforms could be seen, and the red flags at regular intervals were the only form of reference for wayfinding. There even came a point with such limited visibility that only the closest flag could be made out through the white-out conditions. Without that red beacon, would they have found their way back to safety?

Mililani,

Drawings

These works on paper offer glimpses of a few ice and life forms Schwengel-Regala experienced in the underwater realm, again using the flag format to convey information. With admiration for the metalpoint drawings of da Vinci and Durer, Schwengel-Regala has brought this technique into her modern repertoire but in a unique combination—using the same waterproof paper she used as a field biologist. The metals used for these drawings are silver, copper, aluminum, and gold. Lines made with the first two will experience a subtle color shift over time, a natural result of exposure to the atmosphere.

Drawings are grouped by their respective dive locations. Each site had a unique complement of creatures and ice formations.

Courtesy of the artist

Dive sites

Metalpoint drawings on white flags

Arrival Heights (18k gold)

- anchor ice - in shallow depths, supercooled water forms crystalline plates on the substrate and around this bush sponge (Homaxinella balfourensis)

Little Razorback (copper)

- close-up texture of nudibranch (Bathyberthella antarctica)

- polychaete worm (Flabegraviera mundata) Turtle Rock (aluminum)

- close-up of crinoid (Promachocrinus kerguelensis)

- brinicles - formed on the bottom of the ice ceiling when supercooled fresh water seeps into the salt water and freezes

- close-up of pores in green sponge (Latrunculia biformis)

Intake Jetty (silver)

- dragonfish eggs (Gymnodraco acuticeps)

- pteropod mollusk (Clione antarctica)

- close-up of oral arms of jelly (Diplulmaris antarctica)

- narcomedusa jelly - (Solmundella bitentaculata)

Checkered flags help divers orient to the overhead ice hole.

Blank flags hold space for the Antarctic discoveries yet to be found.

Hawai’i

Displayed together: Red Flag Installation White Flag Installation

Courtesy of the artist