The girl who was swallowed by ice and snow
Bernadette Hall and Kathryn Madill
The Tuirau Arcade, 2026

Bernadette Hall and Kathryn Madill shared an Artists in Antarctic Award in 2004, a memorable experience that drew them into creative collaborations and an enduring and close friendship.

The girl who was swallowed by ice and snow is an ice-aching poem exhibition story fable haunting collaboration with text by Bernadette and paintings by Kathryn. An exhibition was displayed from 17 March to 13 April 2026 at City Art Depot Gallery, Christchurch.

Sometimes I pick up a book, and it is perfect timing, a book that fills the gap or ache or hunger of now. I open the The girl who was swallowed by ice and snow, and get that electric connection, this is the book I need to be reading, this slender book that opens out into thickets of discovery, recognition, delight.

Sul is sixteen, born on a Sunday, she is full of grace, but for some self-smashing, self-unacccountable reason, she plunges into a crippling state of silence. A state of frozen ice. But then, after days and months entrapped, upon hearing her name called in the middle of the night, she moves. She begins walking moving walking moving with ice limbs through garden forest beach.

Sul is moving with a comfort quilt draped across her shoulders, through a radically changed world, with horrifying things sliding off a banquet table, with no desire, just ice. And here we are in the mysterious terrain of fable, with a tugging desire to be walking, to be naming things, with a moon ladder, with the world’s fabled beginnings, with the fingertap of the dead and death, in some scenes.

And yes we are in the terrain of fable when a rescue Ice Warden cares for Sul, with uncertain and maybe unstable time passing, and dear Sul is fed snow berries and sea lettuce and stories.

The Ice Warden takes her to the sharpest ice shard imaginable, figuratively, and literally, there in the Antarctica scene, to a frozen ice hut, to an ice bridge collapsed, to scrapping sled dogs and to where men are trapped in blizzard death, trapped in stagger and collapse, and the death-watch Ice Warden unwittingly offers a turning point, an epiphany moment for dear Sul.

More than anything, I am busting through ice to care for and be cared for, for Sul to be cared for and to care for. For you to care for and be cared for. Musing within this precious moment on how to care for the person next to me, how to be held in warm embrace, how to recognise what I want and need when desire is a big thin unstable wedge.

Bernadette’s writing is a visual canvas, painterly with detail, economical, lyrical, rich in effect. The sentences exude an exquisite honeyed fluency, even when writing of ice and shards and death and the dead, uncertain times and timings. The sublime rhythm and simplicity accentuates the haunting, the fablesque, the real world.

Kathryn’s artwork, comprising watercolours and monoprints, is a dark-light visionary narrative, also lyrical with haunting rhythms, and if you place your ear tenderly against an image, you will hear the mysterious haunting dream. The pitch black intimate night of the painting. I am, for example, drawn deep into the empty chair, the velvety red smudges, the suspended moon. The rippling paint texture catching the intimate interior world of Sul.

I am shimmering and shivering and thawing and dreaming beyond and within the layers of this extraordinary wee book. Thank you.

The photo was taken in the City Art Depot in Otautahi Christchurch

“On March 17 at the City Art Gallery in Ōtautahi Christchurch, my YA short story ‘The Girl Who Was Swallowed by Ice and Snow’ will be launched. It is a collaboration with the Dunedin artist, Kathryn Madill, 1,800 words from me and 17 paintings from her. Set in an Antarctic dreamscape, it explores the phenomenon of silence, the kind of silence the young can vanish into. To save themselves. As I did when my dad died in front of me when I was 16 years old. His Irish heart giving out. So it has taken me 22 years to make this artwork. How wonderful to celebrate the making now with Kathryn.” Bernadette Hall

Bernadette Hall is Otago born and bred. Following a long and much enjoyed career as a high school teacher in Dunedin and Christchurch, she has for the last eighteen years lived in a renovated bach at Amberley Beach in the Hurunui, North Canterbury, where she has built up a beautiful garden. Fancy Dancing is her eleventh collection of poetry. In 2015 she collaborated with Robyn Webster on Matakaea, Shag Point, an art /text installation exhibited at the Ashburton Art Gallery. In the same year she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in poetry. In 2017 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Dunedin artist Kathryn Madill is an established New Zealand artist. Her paintings, drawings and prints explore fragments of literature, legend and landscape. Within these delicate works, we find poised moments of human experience stalled against the grey of day, the dark of night, the barren contours of a desolate landscape. Madill has been a consistent exhibitor at City Art Depot since our first exhibition in 2001.

The exhibition: The girl who was swallowed by ice and snow, City Art Depot Gallery, Christchurch, 17 March to 13 April 2026 exhibition link. gallery

The publisher: The Tuirau Arcade thetuirauarcade@gmail.com

An event June 19th

An event: Waimakariri Libraries invite lovers of stories and beautiful art to enjoy a lively book talk to celebrate ‘The girl who was swallowed by ice and snow’, a book written by Bernadette Hall with accompanying artworks Kathryn Madill.

This special event features images of the original artworks by Kathryn Madill, and a reading from the book by Bernadette Hall. This beautiful book is 20 years in the making, with roots that go back to their shared 2004 residency in Antarctica.