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 Illustration: Clare Plug. Ice Crack 2 , 2008. The New Zealand textile artist Clare Plug has spent the last few years of her career developing a fascinating body of work that entails intimately observed details along with wider conceptions and observations of the most rarely visited of all the planets continents. In 2006 Plug was lucky enough to visit the continent of Antarctica as part of a fellowship, staying with the official government Antarctica NZ at Scott Base in the vicinity of the Ross Ice Shelf. It is no small exaggeration to say that this experience fundamentally changed her views and the entire aspect of her work, so much so that much of the textile art work that she produces to this day is haunted by this most spectacular and hauntingly beautiful continent. Illustration: Clare Plug. Ice Crack 2 (detail), 2008. The three works shown here are examples of Plug's Antarctica Series which explores a number of aspects of the continent from the fragile and relatively recent...

Illustration: Jeanne Raffer Beck. Pages 1 . Illustration: Jeanne Raffer Beck. Pages 1 (detail). Ever since the creation of human writing there has been a fascination with the written word. At times it seems almost magical that abstract shapes can give us an understanding and knowledge not only of the world around us, but also of the individuals that inhabit it. When you take this analogy across time it becomes both astounding and poignant, with generations passing down glimpses of their personality, dreams and fears to those who follow after them. American textile and mixed media artist Jeanne Raffer Beck has made the written word one of the central cores of her creative work. As a long term professional writer she has an innate understanding of subtle inflection and intonation, the boundaries of words and the complexity of language. Although the written word cannot give us nearly as much information as the spoken word, with its particular and individual inflections and tone, there is...