Ellen Dahl, Field Notes from the Edge / Valley #4, 2024. Eco solvent pigment print on cotton rag. 60 x 65 cm.
Ellen Dahl, The Edge of Time, 2024. Archival pigment print on fibre rag, 100 x 70 cm.
Ellen Dahl, Field Notes from the Edge / Valley #1, 2024. Eco solvent pigment print on cotton rag, 60 x 65 cm.
Ellen Dahl, One the Edge, 2024. Archival pigment print.
Ellen Dahl, Field Notes from the Edge / Valley #6, 2024. Stanza from poem by Hannah Jenkins. Archival pigment print.
Ellen Dahl, Field Notes from the Edge/Collapse, 2023. Archival sublimation print on fabric, 252 x 160 cm.
Photography can reveal something about a place, if you give it time. Ellen Dahl has noticed this throughout her decades-long practice. “It takes a long time for me to properly understand what it is I’ve captured,” she says. “Sometimes, I don’t know it until I’ve shot another location, and I find a cross-geographical dialogue that helps me understand what was there, and the conversation I want to have with it.”
Field Notes from the Edge is an ongoing photographic series that has captured many sites, creating a dialogue between works that centre place. Among them is Four Days Before Winter, a four-part piece that won the 2024 National Photography Prize earlier this year. The works were shot in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago just south of the North Pole, and one of the fastest warming places on earth.
Ellen Dahl, Field Notes from the Edge / Valley #2, 2024. Eco solvent pigment print on cotton rag, 60 x 65 cm.
“What’s going on there is very troubling,” says Dahl. “I’ve worked with landscape as a medium for a long time, in the context of the ecological, the geological, place and belonging, and how a sense of place can be both local and universal. But today, it’s impossible for the ecological [aspect] not to take centre stage.”
Dahl was born in the Arctic north of Norway, but currently lives on Gadigal land in Sydney. “I’ve always felt like a visitor here,” she says, yet she found a sense of familiarity in photographing Tasmania for the series, creating a “a north-south dialogue” with the pieces from the Svalbard.
“Place has always been important to me. I often return back to things I know, or I go to places that somehow connect with something I know. I found that in Tasmania very much. The periphery is something I’m really interested in—liminal space—where the meeting point between human and non-human is very felt.”