Water, Water Everywhere: Nor any Drop to Drink
Jessica Houston

Houston offers a different and more reflective take on the southern polar region. Meditating on ice, deep time, and the layered afterlives of polar exploration. Houston’s multilayered yet quietly observational work asks viewers to consider the processes of withdrawal occurring before our eyes. Rather than issuing a single ecological imperative, the film reads the present: it makes visible the material traces of exploration and extraction, the emergent behaviours of ice and ocean, and the ambivalent mix of awe and grief that follows.

Water, Water Everywhere weaves together human and more-than-human histories in Antarctica. Filmed during a 2024 expedition, the work opens with snowflakes forming in darkness, then expands into a shifting visual landscape where glaciers calve, krill swarm, and an albatross cuts across the sky. Footage of ship rudders breaking through ice, abandoned whaling stations, and decaying outposts are layered with macro images of snow and water in transformation.

The video moves between scales and temporalities – glacial time, colonial residue, and emergent natural systems – to explore the afterlives of exploration and the fragility of ecological balance. Fractal geometries, oceanic currents, and the micro-structure of ice become metaphors for interconnectedness, self-organisation, and collective change.

“The title borrows from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a text that endures as both a cautionary tale and an ecological allegory. The Mariner’s rupture of the natural order reverberates today, as we navigate the climate crisis and its cascading effects. My hope is that this work opens a space for reflection and re-enchantment – a space where awe and grief, beauty and urgency can coexist, and where viewers might reconsider their relationship to Earth’s fragile and dynamic systems. Ultimately, the work seeks to underscore our deep interdependence with nature, where the whole is contained in every part.”