Home and the living is easy. I am warm and simply dressed. My eyes see a wild range of colour, my ears hear the sounds of urban fast activity. The previous three days spent in Spitsbergen feel now as if they have been put in a bottle. An extraordinary physical experience in a mainly white and silent environment; so different from anything I have previously known that the memories seem suspended and as yet unable to attach themselves to any part of me.

Any ideas about movement ended up rotating around walking. A useful action and a powerful image whenever I saw one tiny person walking into a vast luminous mountain ringed plain.

On Thursday morning most of us collected together to pace out the landscape for the film crew. If I think about the list of names that formed this short lived dance company it makes me laugh with pride. A few moments of walking the landscape exploring the rhythm, the crunchy sounds and the changing size of the human body before the company dispersed and went back to their own projects.

Some of us carried on with the walking theme by traversing an icy mountain, snow blowing along the ground, making it look floaty and unstable. Some reindeer roaming towards us, their pace long, high stepping and quite like a dressage horse. On the ground Ptarmigans, round white birds scuttled very fast before vanishing into more white. Our walking turned into slipping on ice or pushing our heals down into snow to help us keep upright while going steeply down hill. Every kind of putting one foot in front of the other had it's use.

I would like to thank David Buckland and Cape Farewell for the opportunity to see and feel at a new level and also to thank everyone on board the ice bound schooner, the Noorderlicht. The artists, scientists, film crew, ships crew and guides. Each one gave of themselves with actions, thinking, hard work and sharing information. I am trying to capture a sensation that I feel right now and I think it is a form of tenderness. I needed to protect my body from the intense cold but the rest of me feels as if I have received such warmth and generosity.

Thank you all,

Siobhan Davies

(Clockwise from top left)
1. Antony Gormley and sculpture
2. Ice-saw and ice-block
3. Antony Gormley in sub-zero kit
4. Three Made Places (in-progress) by Antony Gormley and Peter Clegg

Antony Gormley