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

Ellen Dahl

19 Mar - 11 Apr 2026

Bringing together recurring concerns that shape her practice, including time, place, and the entanglement of human and more-than-human histories, Dahl’s exhibition moves between the monumental and the intimate. Hellenic-inspired Roman sculptures, ancient cave systems, and ecological still lifes coexist within a photographic language that resists linear time. These subjects, shaped by vastly different temporal scales, become points of encounter where endurance, vulnerability, and transformation are held in tension.

Dahl is drawn to forms that already carry time within them. Roman sculptures bear centuries of touch, weathering, displacement, and cultural reframing. Caves register mineral accretion and erosion across immense geological durations. Stones, lichen, and remnants gathered during fieldwork operate at a more intimate register, where planetary processes are encountered through the studio. Drawn from an evolving image archive, the works include both recent photographs and reinterpretations of earlier material, collapsing distinctions between ancient and contemporary, permanence and fragility.

Photography here is not neutral documentation but a method of world-making. Working in low light and with extended exposure, Dahl allows photographic time to falter. Detail slips, surfaces soften, colours shift, and duration becomes visible within the image itself. The camera’s promise to arrest a moment becomes unstable and time accumulates rather than freezes.

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

Please email info@thisisnofantasy.com for an exhibition preview