IN THE GALLERY: Like Rain on a Mountain (The Poetics of Time)

Ellen Dahl

19 Mar - 18 Apr 2026

This exhibition brings together recurring concerns that shape Ellen Dahl’s practice: time, place, and the entanglement of human and more-than-human histories. The works move between the monumental and the intimate, drawing together sites and objects shaped by vastly different temporal scales. Rather than offering fixed representations, they function as points of encounter where endurance, vulnerability, and transformation are held in tension.

Dahl is drawn to subjects that already carry time within them. Hellenic-inspired Roman sculptures bear centuries of touch, weathering, displacement, and cultural reframing. Caves register mineral accretion and erosion across immense geological durations. Ecological objects collected during fieldwork operate at a more intimate register, where planetary processes are encountered through the studio still life. Her practice evolves through an expanding image archive that becomes artworks through reinterpretation and dialogue across geographical place, time, and ecological connection.

Photography here is not approached as neutral documentation, but as a method of world-making. The camera’s relationship to time – its promise to arrest a moment – becomes unstable under challenging conditions of low light and extended exposure. In these moments, photographic time falters: detail slips, surfaces soften, colours shift, and duration becomes visible within the image itself.

Like rain on a mountain, momentary yet transformative over millennia, the exhibition proposes time as layered, relational, and always in the process of becoming.

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