Reducing surfaces
This is an online version of a work that was made for On Water and Time / a glacier leaves a deep cut at Verge Gallery 10 April – 16 May, 2025.
This exhibtion brings together new and established strands of Ellen Dahl’s artistic practice and her ongoing creative collaboration with poet Hannah Jenkins.
Reducing surfaces is a poem that constantly emerges, crawls, spreads, melts, and regenerates.
Made from snippets of text Hannah has written for Ellen over the last five years, it relies on the slow dredging of materials collected over time.
Its strength comes from this cumulative effect of expressing our creative relationship, rather than from the power of any one line in isolation.
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.