On a snowy Friday evening, we embarked on an adventure. Trekking through the yet-unplowed wilderness, we arrived at The School of the Photographic Arts (SPAO) to celebrate the New Year with a glass of bubbly and attend the opening reception of Cold Comfort by artist Ella Morton.
Cold Comfort is part of the artist’s ongoing project, The Dissolving Landscape, and is on display until February 19. Working primarily with lens-based media, Morton is creating a collection of analogue photographs that highlight the beauty of Arctic Canada and Nordic Europe, while asking us to focus on the deeper underlying meaning of climate change and our spiritual connection to the eroding land.
The Cold Comfort exhibition at SPAO features three walls of colourful, ethereal photographs, a wall of black-and-white work, and a video.
Photo: Curtis Perry.
Morton began her expedition-based practice with a 2010 residency in Iceland, her first Northern landscape love. Originally from British Columbia, the artist now lives in Tkarón:to (Toronto), on the land of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. Morton has travelled to Scandinavia, Antarctica, the Arctic, and the sub-Arctic in search of rugged and cold landscapes.
“I am drawn to the harshness of them,” says the artist. “It is inconvenient to travel there; it can be expensive, and travel often changes due to schedules in weather. But the landscapes give you back something. They are lands of huge extremes and contradictions—it can be dark all day and night in the winter and bright 24 hours a day in the summer. It’s a very different place to be, but then you see beautiful things like the Northern Lights. You get stillness and solitude; you can see everything for miles.”
Artist Ella Morton (right). Photo: Curtis Perry.
Morton’s analogue photographs are like none I’ve seen before. Manipulating the film with techniques such as soaking, mordançage, bleaching, and hand-colouring, Morton works with the very DNA of her creation to tell a story about climate change. Many of the black-and-white photographs feature an element of “folds,” giving the appearance of delicate fabric like silk draped in strategic positions. It turns out this is thanks to a specific print manipulation called mordançage.
Morton taught herself how to do it: “You take a darkroom print and soak it in acid. This emulsion will lift off on the black parts of the photo and create a membrane. You can then manipulate it how you want—I use Qtips sometimes!—then soak the print in warm water to get the acid off, and redevelop it in the developer. Think about the shot before taking it, where the negative space is. It’s the black of the photo that interacts with the silver in the paper and lifts with the acid.”
We love attending exhibitions at SPAO because we always learn something new, and it’s lovely to see students of the school come out and interact with the new work, too. See you at SPAO!
Discover the new exhibition at SPAO and take a gander at the diploma program and educational programming on offer.
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