ELLEN DAHL AND POET HANNAH JENKINS
’On Water and Time / a glacier leaves a deep cut’
10 APRIL – 16 MAY, 2025

PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Thursday 10 April: Exhibition Launch
Wednesday 16 April: Slow Looking Workshop
Tuesday 29 April: In Conversation with Ellen Dahl
Thursday 1, 8, and 15 May: Echoes: On Water and Time

Ellen Dahl, On Water and Time, video still, 2025, two-channel HD video with sound, 8’50” looped. Image courtesy of the artist.

ARTIST STATEMENT

 Dark calculations,

I trace them along the slope of the horizon,

the measurement of time is simply the surface of the water,  
rotating away from the sun.

On Water and Time / a glacier leaves a deep cut brings together new and established strands of Ellen Dahl’s artistic practice and her ongoing creative collaboration with poet Hannah Jenkins. 

Working in response to two specific sites, Nordenskiöld Glacier in Svalbard and Jostedalsbreen in Norway, Dahl’s expanded photographic practice—encompassing scale, materiality, still-motion and sound—traces the marks left by the slow, inexorable movements of ice as it carves and erases in equal measure.  

As new snow and ice reform the glaciers, they embed information on the chemical composition of the atmosphere, creating unique high-resolution archives of the planet’s climate. Ice cores extracted from glaciers provide critical data for tracing environmental changes, but as glaciers melt more than the new snow and ice they attain each winter, these frozen records of environmental and climatic history turn into meltwater. 

On Water and Time / a glacier leaves a deep cut considers how these natural archives shift, dissolve, and reveal the impact of human activity on the environment. Photography, video, sound and poetry combine as instruments not of documentation, but of translation: ephemeral whispers accrete into lasting impressions, and immense geological time scales are condensed into the fleeting perception of the present.