Like Rain on a Mountain (the Poetics of Time) brings together a constellation of works that explore the layered relationships between time, place, and the entanglement of human and more-than-human histories. Moving between the monumental and the intimate, Ellen Dahl’s photographs draw together ancient sculptures, subterranean cave formations, and ecological still lifes collected through fieldwork. These subjects — each carrying distinct temporal scales — become sites of encounter where endurance, vulnerability, and transformation coexist.
In Dahl’s practice, photography operates not as neutral documentation but as a method of world-making. Challenging conditions of low light, extended exposure, and uneven illumination disrupt the camera’s promise to arrest a moment, allowing duration, instability, and material change to surface within the image itself. Classical forms appear less as symbols of permanence than as bodies subject to erosion and reinterpretation, while caves and ecological objects anchor the work within deep geological and present-day time.

Ellen Dahl is a visual artist originally from Arctic Norway who now lives and works on Gadigal Country (Sydney). Working across photography and installation, her practice explores landscape, ecological imagination, and the complex intersections of human and geological time.