IN THE GALLERY: The Edge of Time

Ellen Dahl

19 Oct - 16 Nov 2024

The Edge of Time is Ellen Dahl’s first solo exhibition in the gallery, following her showing at Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam in September 2024.

The Edge of Time showcases Ellen Dahl’s ongoing attraction to places at the edge of the world, alongside her current research on glaciers and their inherent relationship to time. For this exhibition, she has brought together works from two specific sites; Nordenskiöld Glacier, in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, and Jostedalsbreen (Norway), the largest glacier in continental Europe. Seeking to capture the heightened sense of liminality and edge-ness often felt at these sites, Dahl’s work is conceptually underpinned by trepidation around the Anthropogenic condition and the consequent ambiguousness of overlapping human and geological time scales.

The peripheral Arctic Svalbard is located approximately 1000km south of the North Pole and is known for its remoteness and stunning Arctic environment. It is also one of the fastest warming places on Earth. Paradoxically, the archipelago has a long multi-national history of coal mining that is scheduled to finally cease in 2025.

Every season, every year, new layers of ice and snow get compressed and formed into the glaciers, embedding information on the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Their physical nature makes them unique archives of the Planet’s climate and proxies for tracing environmental changes. As the glaciers melt, these frozen libraries of invaluable knowledge of environmental and climatic history slowly turns into meltwater.

In Field Notes from the Edge/Valley 1- 6 (2024), Dahl has collaborated with poet Hannah Jenkins* – with whom she shares a common interest around geological imagination, human/more-than-human entanglement, the edge, melancholy, and time. In combining ekphrastic imagery of environments in crisis with an abstracted, desolate entity that seems to exist within the Arctic topography depicted by Dahl – Jenkins’ poem further evokes ways of seeing and sensing that go beyond human ideas of scale and time.

*Hannah Jenkins is a poet and editor specialising in digital platforms and writing experiments. They are the co-founder of crawlspace.cool, an online project to cultivate and platform artistic and poetic applications of technology.

Join us in the gallery on Saturday 19 Oct 2 – 4pm for the exhibition opening + artist in conversation

Please email info@thisisnofantasy.com for an exhibition catalogue