Megan Jenkinson is currently a Senior Lecturer at The University of Auckland. She began exhibiting her photographic works during the 1980s, including featuring work in the seminal exhibition Photography Now, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In February 2009 she exhibited for the first time at Stills Gallery with the series Fleet Light.

The direction of this recent work began with her experiences as a New Zealand Antarctic Artist's Fellow in late 2005. Prior to and following her time on the ice she immersed herself in the exploratory and scientific literature on Antarctica. That research took two parallel paths. First an increasing interest in atmospheric effects such as the Aurora Australis phenomenon (The Atmospheric Optics series) and second the exploratory and scientific descriptions of the Antarctic experience (The Morrell's Islands series).

These interests became part of the foundation for her current work. On the one hand the assertively objective view of science setting out to explain the Antarctic world. On the other hand the unique, strange, and unworldly experience of a monochromatic and uninhabited landscape, that just when it is at its darkest and most lifeless - in the middle of the Polar night - is lit up by visually spectacular explosions of celestial colour.

Jenkinson felt the Aurora Australis, and other mirage-like qualities of the Antarctic sky and landscape, could best be appreciated in this way. Mere photography, like hard science, could not fulfill that task and she set out to recapture what the eye, not the camera, sees. Her solution is the use of the lenticular image process. That involves the digital reconstitution of several images into a single print, onto which is placed a ridged lens that simultaneously reveals and conceals parts of the print. The result is a shifting, illusory, image arising from the movement of the viewer in front of the work.

The Atmospheric Optics series of aurorae is complimented by the Morrell's Islands series, where the further conceptual dimension of apparent knowledge or belief is added. This series arose largely from Jenkinson's reading of exploration journals, where the peculiar phenomenon of mirage islands was frequently mentioned. It seems many early explorers, such as Captain Morrell, named and carefully charted a number of Antarctic islands. Yet when later expeditions searched for them they had disappeared. The obvious explanation, that they were simply huge icebergs, is not in fact the accepted one, but rather it seems that Polar mirages were the cause. Distance, scale, and certainty, are notoriously fickle in those regions and still fool even the most seasoned observers (sometimes with tragic consequences). Again the lenticular process has been used by Jenkinson to entice the viewer into that unnerving world. Cold grey seas promise islands that come and go almost as if one stood on the freezing, heaving deck of some explorers ship.

To explain aurorae or mirages scientifically is not to convey them visually. For Megan Jenkinson this challenge relates back to a long-standing interest in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's writing on colour and its elusiveness. Goethe, in his Theory of Colours (1810), described colours as 'acts of light' and particularly focused on what he felt was their fugitive and transient nature. He suggested, in particular, that only in a state of almost meditative contemplation could the true nature of colour be appreciated. Apprehending its true nature was like the effect of an afterimage: the epiphany of colour was that only for a brief moment after it had been could you know that it was there.

Jenkinson's work challenges the viewer to accept uncertainty as an opportunity. In the same way that Newton could only explain colour as a cold scientific rainbow, for Goethe it was an opportunity to see colour as 'acts of light'. Continuing that general theme in terms of colour and perception, that the surface of things is not the same as their substance, Jenkinson's latest series Spectrals is now considering a wider application of the same concepts - how what we see and believe is not necessarily based upon the facts that we are presented with.

Jenkinson, who lives in New Zealand, has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Sydney Biennale (1990), the Sharjah Biennale (1999) and the touring exhibiting The Light Horizon (2008). She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards and has work held in institutions including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Australia, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

These images are a selection from the artist's portfolio. More images are available for viewing in the gallery's Print Room.