Lunchtime Talk: Rebecca Priestley - Illustrating Precarity

The second lunchtime talk in association with Adam Art Gallery's current exhibitions is by science writer Rebecca Priestley. Priestly brings her knowledge of the history of Antarctica to bear on Joyce Campbell’s 2006 series Last Light. Like Campbell, Priestly has spent time in time in Antarctica and shares her interest in the early romantic visions projected onto the continent.

As a creative non-fiction writer working in the space between art and science, Priestley believes art can play a role in conveying information about the ecological threats posed by climate change to lay people. She explores how creative writing and image making might circumvent the specialist language found in academic journals to connect with the reality that we all are implicated in deciding the fate of the planet.

Rebecca Priestley is Associate Professor at Victoria University of Wellington’s Centre for Science in Society, where she teaches courses on the social, political, and historic context of current Antarctic research. With over twenty years of science communications experience, Priestley received the Prime Minister’s Science Communicator’s prize in 2016.

Her most recent publication, Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica (VUP, 2019) is a personal response to her three visits to the continent. Prior to that Priestley authored Mad on Radium (AUP, 2012) and edited collections of New Zealand and Antarctic science writing, including Dispatches from Continent Seven: An Anthology of Antarctic Science (Awa Press, 2016).