The Edge of Time

THIS IS NO FANTASY GALLERY

Fitzroy Melbourne

October 2024

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Gallery statement:

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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.

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In the series 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 environmental topography depicted by Dahl – Jenkins’ poem further evokes ways of seeing and sensing that go beyond human ideas of scale and time.

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VALLEY by Hannah Jenkins

 

I stay low
           like a stratum laid on the ocean

            floor in the pull of supercontinents.

I rest in runoff
           from those mighty mountain tops

            sheared off by the wind.

I pull minerals

            for my mantle like

            un-pristine royalty lying face down.

I thrive feverish

            pallid and mossed as ice

            flows above and rivers underneath.

I plunge my nails

           into black silt to make fists and feel

           what has come 4 billion years before.

I gaze upwards

           at peaks and constellations divining

           what’s owed and what’s to come.

I drain all my talent

            keeping company with valleys—

            but he who looks down from mountains

            must soon come to feel insignificant.

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Install photography by Simon Strong

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