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
Tuesday 6 May: Making Poetry Machines
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.
EXHIBITION TEXT
On Water and Time / a glacier leaves a deep cut
By Hannah Jenkins
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The glacier heaves over the land, gouging into the bedrock under the force of its own weight. It has spent centuries accumulating ice and snow, compressing and holding, reshaping the surface of the earth. Its body is a shifting beast of dark blue crevasses, running meltwater and fractured ice streams. Its constant internal deformations fuel its movement as it slowly expands and recedes—breathing.
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What began as a trickle of words into this landscape, became a flood of language and cyclical exchanges of ideas between us. For the last five years, since I first wrote an experimental response to Ellen’s images, we have layered poetry on photography on glassy rods on essays on water on voices on light on time.
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Together, we’re searching for an imagined consciousness in nature—or a way to capture what we already know is there, a mournful post-apogee slithering of rock and ice. In dialogue with each other, and with the glacier, we speak back and forth about deep time and its effects within the interiority of the ice, and on its thawing surface.
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How can we translate this dialogue? We are entering the glacier itself, while also viewing it from afar. We hear it crackling and softening, and understand the ephemerality of its immense strength. For Ellen, she overlays vastly different scales of images on top of and alongside each other. The line of the horizon becomes the lip of a blue crevasse becomes the glacial striations revealed by the retreating ice.
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For me, I attempt to draw out stories from within the ice, even as it shifts away from us. Often, as words settle, they want to form a rigid logic for the world. My task is to preserve these fragile translations as propositions, or possibilities, instead. Poetry is not a limiter or a rule, it is orienting us in the right direction, then pushing us forwards on our first step into the ether.
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It is this poetry that forms the foundation of Ellen’s two-channel video work, On Water and Time. The written poem on the left, a glacier leaves a deep cut, is one I wrote in 2022. She responded to its heavy, corporeal language, and its use of a countdown that shifts from geological time scales into human time scales into zero to curate the flow of still and moving images.
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In response to these image selections, I wrote an ‘expansion’ of the original 2022 poem (which we began to refer to as ‘the core’) as a series of stanzas designed to slot in between each existing line. If the core is looking back from a desolate future, the expansion is the solitary breath in, looking forward before collapse. A voice whispers despairingly, guiding you through a landscape that is crumbling apart at the molecular level across all moments in time.
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Time will always be slippery across such scales. A glacier’s movement is slow, and geological time seems incomprehensible when millennia are reduced to millimetres in an extracted core. While photography is an incision into this slow time—we can only look backwards from this point. How do these scales tell us how long a glacier took to form, or how long until it will take to melt away completely?
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Ice cores, drilled and extracted from glaciers, afford scientists a way to time travel. Unpicking centuries of compressed ice creates invaluable archives of environmental and human history. Materials and gasses found in cores help create global climate models, charting the impacts of entire epochs, and more recent events like the Industrial Revolution.
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Rain is frozen into ice crystals which fall as snow and eventually compress to form ice, which in turn will one day melt back into water. The glacier was always in constant flux, but meltwater damage, exponentially expedited by a warming planet, compromises this scientific work. We cannot refreeze the fragile past. All will be lost if we cannot preserve it.
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Even the low echoes of drips or rutted cliff faces slippery with runoff become alarming with this knowledge. An ocean of the dissolved past moves through us even as we attempt to hold it back. What could be written in response to this feeling? I struggle to translate the surreality of what Ellen has confronted with her lens without falling into dark ruminations and helplessness.
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In resurfacing text I have previously written for Ellen, Reducing Surfaces becomes a reflection on language accretion over time. Building this poem was itself a cyclical process, relying on the methodical dredging of materials collected over years, then allowing the text to take on a life of its own: crawling, melting, spreading, regenerating. In its final forms, as a looping work in the gallery, and a generative, infinite work online, it’s now a translation of my previous attempts at translation. It is the gentle snowfall on the glacier that will soon be compressed into the body. It is a stalagmite calcifying over time from small but constant drips.
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On Water and Time / a glacier leaves a deep cut is an acknowledgement and affirmation of how Ellen and I continue to work together, layering approaches and materials to translate our exchanges. We uncover counterpoints and perspectives that emerge between the scientific register and the intimate whisper, between antipodean and arctic destruction, between vastly different time scales flowing in opposite directions.
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We have developed a secret language. It is an accumulated language of the methodical picking apart of what has been compressed over time. It is a distillation of geological imagination and the inherent melancholy of time passing. It is a pocket of illusion, a circular frame, a recessed light—it does not require a definition because you already know what it's saying.
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We have already spoken this language to each other, at the edge of the world, cupping hands over hands over hands as meltwater rushes through our grasping fingers.
/ a deep cut
View Reducing Surfaces (2025) in full screen here.