Looking south: making monuments to the British Antarctic Expedition

Abstract

Centred on the bronze relief Monument to the Antarctic Exploration Party under Captain Robert Falcon Scott: Dr Edward Wilson, Capt. Lawrence Oates, Lieut. Henry Bowers & Petty Officer Edgar Evans by Stanley Nicholson Babb, this article problematizes the ways in which narratives of polar exploration have been constructed in and by the Anglosphere. Situating this monument to the 1910–13 British Antarctic Expedition in conversation with the work of two British women sculptors, Kathleen Scott, the wife of Robert Falcon Scott, and contemporary artist Polly Gould, not only frames the wider image cultures that emanated from this expedition but offers alternative narratives and ways of recontextualizing both the expedition and Babb’s monument to the expedition party displayed in St Paul’s Cathedral.