ELLEN DAHL

Dahl’s practice is largely rooted in working with or around the landscape. Photography’s intrinsic involvement in how we see and feel about the world around us underpins her projects. She continually explores the expanded field of the photographic medium and its potential to engage new ways of assembling ecological meaning and geological imagination. She is also interested in the medium’s relationship to time, exploring it across photography, video and still-motion, sound, and installation.

Dahl has an ongoing attraction to the concept of the island and places at the end of the world, often returning to the north / south peripheries of northern Norway and Tasmania. Seeking to capture the heightened sense of liminality and edge-ness often felt at these sites, her work is underpinned by trepidation around the anthropogenic condition and the consequent ambiguousness of overlapping human and geological time scales. Encounters with the landscape often oppose clear articulation, words can only hint at the profound engagement between a person and the natural environment. Dahl’s work alludes to instances that provoke an uncanny sense of place, a shared history, and a deep connection—permeating across distance and time.

Having exhibited extensively across Australia, most recently Dahl was awarded the MAMA National Photography Prize 2024, and has been a finalist in prizes including Josephine Ulrick & Winn Schubert Photographic Award 2022, HIDDEN Sculpture Award 2022, Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Scholarship 2021, and Hazelhurst Works on Paper 2021, and won the Commendation Prize in the CLIP Award 2017.

She has exhibited at institutions including the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; ANU Gallery, Canberra, and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, and has also curated projects across Australia. Dahl received a Master of Fine Arts from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney in 2015, and a PhD from the School of Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania in 2024.