Field Notes from the Edge #5 (2022)
Photographic image on aluminium composite, sandbags and timber
A foreign landscape drifts displaced, suspended in a moment of reprieve on the other side of the world. Frozen in time as a memento mori, it reminds us of what is about to be lost.
This incredibly remote site is on the Norwegian Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard, about 1000km south of the North Pole. While renowned for its pristine nature and projection of deep time, the stain of human activity is visible across the receding glacial topography.
About the Artist
Ellen Dahl was born in Norway and now lives on Gadigal Country in Sydney’s Inner West. Working across photography, video, sound and installation, her practice explores the expanded field of the photographic medium and its potential to engage new critical, poetic and aesthetic conditions for assembling ecological meaning and geological imagination. Ellen has exhibited extensively throughout Australia, including Australian Centre for Photography Sydney, National Portrait Gallery Canberra, Centre for Contemporary Photography Melbourne, ANU Gallery Canberra, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Dominik Merch Gallery Sydney. Ellen holds an MFA from SCA, University of Sydney and is a PhD candidate at School of Creative Arts, University of Tasmania.
Transcription
My name is Ellen Dhal and the title of my artwork is Field Notes from the Edge #5.
This photographic image is from a field trip to the incredibly remote site of the Norwegian Arctic archipelagos, Svalbard, about a thousand kilometers south of the North Pole. This place is renowned for its pristine Arctic nature and the projection of deep time, while the stain of human activity is increasingly visible across the receding glacial topography.
Field Notes from the Edge #5, and the larger ongoing project it forms part of, reflects on this edge world and the consequent overlapping time scales of human time and geological time at the periphery. This artwork combines two driving forces within my creative practice.
Firstly, I often work with the concept of the landscape or conceptually informed by anxieties around the antipassy in condition we now live in, and secondly, I have an ongoing interest in exploring the expanded field of photography and how this can influence how we assemble ecological meaning and geological imagination. Photography, all photographic images, are an intrinsic part and how we see and think of the world around us, but in the current deluge of images flooding all platforms of our contemporary media, it can be hard to connect and reflect on what we see.
For HIDDEN, I've created a photographic sculpture by printing and wallpaper and building a timber structure that support the image to stand on its own. With the HIDDEN exhibition being held at Rookwood Cemetery, I was drawn to the idea of this very foreign nodern landscape being isolated and supported in a moment of reprieve in a cemetery rest house on the other side of the world, as if it'd been frozen in time as a memento mori reminding us of what it's about to be lost. I hope that the out of placeness between image and side delivers the viewer a chance to experience and reflect on the image in front of them.