THERE WAS a time when any self-respecting explorer would have been dressed for his travels by the tailors Gieves & Hawkes whose Savile Row premises were formerly home to the Royal Geographical Society. Today’s sartorially discerning adventurer, it seems, prefers John Pearse in Soho. I met one there a few days ago. He was standing in front of a flickering fire to be fitted. It will probably be the last time he feels that warm for months because this modern day adventurer was Olly — one half of the artistic duo Olly and Suzi — who are known for their creative collaborations with the Earth’s wildest animals. They have sketched with the wolves and done watercolours with the great white. And their next expedition, they told me, is into polar isolation.

In a couple of weeks’ time, when the first crocuses will be pushing up through the lawn here, they will be crossing the planet’s heaviest waters to seek anchorage in some cranny of the Antarctic Peninsula. There they will seek out the leopard seal. Donning diving suits, and carrying pencils and paper, they will try to capture the quintessence of this consummate predator. Olly shows me an image of it on his mobile phone screen. A creature with muscle-packed jaws stares back with ghoulish eyes.

“Landseer used to have his lions shot and stuffed before he drew them,” says Clive James, a friend of the artists. “Olly and Suzi, who know which side they are on, would have been more likely to shoot and stuff Landseer.” Olly tells me: “Our work is primarily about the raw amazing thrill of an experience. We want to reveal and celebrate the sheer beauty of nature. But from that other implications arise, such as how to conserve it. We like to think that our work has a sting in the tail.”

The role of the artist in this most extreme continent is recognised by the Arts Council and the British Antarctic Survey which annually team up to sponsor (they are currently advertising for applications) six-month placements. The artists’ work, it is hoped, by evoking the continent’s wonders, will rouse respect and environmental concern.

But, even as images awake feelings of awe, they stir a desire to see the Antarctic itself just as, in the Romantic era, evocations of wilderness inspired hordes of walkers to tramp Alpine slopes. Today, tourism is making the fringes of the Antarctic continent increasingly mainstream. Only this year, a two-part BBC holiday programme touts the attractions of this as an alternative resort. Such tourism should be strictly checked.

The world is already too harshly stamped with the imprint of human exploitation. Antarctica’s greatest value lies not in mineral riches, fishery resources or tourist revenue, but in that it remains a wilderness in which the imagination can roam. I hope that Olly and Suzi’s work will deter even as it attracts. I hope it will foster a fearful respect. And, given that the leopard seal flays its prey before swallowing it, thwacking penguins about on the water’s surface to strip them of their skin, I hope that Olly’s tailor has made some stoutly stitched suits.

• POLAR cold would not have appealed to Bob Marley. I met a friend of his the other day in a photo lab. Dennis Morris — the photographer whose images of the reggae star have become iconic — was preparing for a show which opens shortly at the gallery, Blink, in celebration of what would have been Marley’s 60th birthday. Morris was a schoolboy with a passion for photography when he first met Marley. “He had come to England on a tour,” says Morris, “but he was all but unknown outside the Caribbean community. I was a fan so I approached him. ‘You talk funny,’ Marley said because he had never heard a black boy talking Cockney before.” “So do you,” Morris replied. He played truant from school to accompany the Wailers on tour and take pictures. The tour proved shortlived. A day or two in, the band woke up and, seeing snow for the first time, decided that the unearthly white powder was an omen sent by Jah. They hurried back home to hotter climes.

  “By the time the Wailers came back, three years later,” Morris recalls, “they were huge. The Lyceum where they played was so packed that sweat from the crowd was condensing on the ceiling and then falling like rain. It was that concert with its tropical rainstorm that made Marley.”

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