During the summer of 2024, Canadian artist Ella Morton found herself on a journey to what felt like the end of the earth, confronting the sublime and volatile region of the northern Arctic Ocean. Created as a part of Morton’s long-term project The Dissolving Landscape, begun in 2016 during her time in the Arctic Circle Residency in Svalbard, Norway, her new works Pack Ice #1 and Pack Ice #2—evocative, semi-abstract polar landscapes installed outdoors at street-level in busy downtown Vancouver—ask what we may be losing, in terms of a spiritual connection to the land, as the climate rapidly changes.

Presented as murals on the glass façade of the Canada Line’s Vancouver City Centre Station, the two seemingly abstract images of the vast ocean appear to shift and crack like the polar ice caps themselves. Within her analogue-based practice, Morton’s embrace of the unpredictable, in her experimentation and the pursuit of chance effects, contrasts with the slow, precise, and exacting nature of photographing with her large-format film camera. As an example, the artist often soaks her film in acidic solutions in order to degrade the emulsion before exposure, introducing an aspect of unpredictability in the outcome. Further, when printing the images, she uses the mordançage technique—traditionally saved for black-and-white, silver gelatin prints—lifting the emulsion off the paper to create mysterious veils and textures, moving away from documentary-style images of the landscape to create an almost fantastical or dream-like realm.

Morton’s seductive yet unsettling large-scale images are suggestive of an otherworldly portal to a remote and fragile—yet all-too-real—ecosystem, changing at an unnerving pace. Their combination of beauty and decay generates an in-between space for contemplation on the planet’s future, as the planet warms and sea levels rise.

Presented by Capture Photography Festival in partnership with CONTACT, and the Canada Line Public Art Project – InTransit BC

• Ella Morton (she/her) is a Canadian visual artist and filmmaker living in Tkaronto/ Toronto. Her expedition-based practice has brought her to residencies and projects across Canada, Scandinavia and Antarctica. Working primarily with lens-based media, she uses experimental analogue processes to capture the sublime and fragile qualities of remote landscapes. She has exhibited her work internationally, including shows at Lonsdale Gallery (Toronto), Foley Gallery (New York), Contemporary Calgary (Calgary), Galérie AVE (Montréal), Idea Exchange (Cambridge), the Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle), the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art (Kelowna) and Hanstholm Art Space (Denmark). Her work has been featured in a variety of publications including the NPR Picture Show, Better Photography Magazine, Analog Forever Magazine, Lenscratch, the Toronto Star and the British Journal of Photography. She is a sessional photography instructor at York University.