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It is a clear July night and another blizzard is due. Days, nights and months have become fuzzy down here. After more than twenty-five years of constant travel, it is perhaps not surprising that I type this in a scruffy wood and metal hut called Wombat Studio at Mawson Station,roughly 10,000 kilometres south of Pakistan. Outside there is more frozen white than you can shake an ice axe at. A continent squashed by 90 per cent of the planet's ice or nearly 30 million square kilometres of hard H2O, Antarctica is a very strange land indeed.

As the first artist to be invited by the Australian Antarctic Division for a year-long residency, I set up a studio here in February 2009 in order to delve into both art and remoteness. Despite having visited around eighty countries on all continents (including nine visits to the ice), this is the first time in a while I have stayed in a single place longer than a few months.My diary lists many unusual things: climbing nunataks (mountain peaks not covered by the icecap); skiing on the frozen sea in temperatures of minus 21 degrees Celsius; travelling by snow vehicle to count male emperor penguins;witnessing such natural phenomena as solar pillars, sundogs, fata morgana and rare nacreous clouds while removing icicles from my beard. The other day I sat in the hydroponics donga and talked to the budding basil, cherry tomato and capsicum plants. I also make a lot of art ...

It is a treat to have this long studio time to work on my paintings but I pay for this with a lack of physical touch. My partner is 5000 kilometres away and by the time I am extracted from here it will be over twelvemonths since I have seen her. To keep my mind and body busy I work ten to twelve hours a day in my wind-bashed studio. With art I can think tricky thoughts, feeding off the landscape and constructing my own version of the place impregnated with personal experience. An element of homage creeps in with a desire to know the place, and communicate this knowing,but it is too big to know and must be constantly re-mapped. I am seduced by its mystery and the sublime enormity of it all, and I try to retain such feelings in my work ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2010 issue.