Ella Morton
Photographs that illustrate concepts to promote change for the better in our world are always welcome here. Topics like the environment, conservation, and avoiding what seems to be the unavoidable subject of climate change are willingly presented and discussed. Art has always been a fantastic vehicle to put these topics in front of people and make them sit up and take notice. I love that and am always looking for those who do so with grace and intelligence in their work.
This time around, I’m reposting a slightly updated interview that had initially been run over at Analog Forever Magazine with Ella Morton, the exact type of artist I am talking about. She uses alternative and historical photographic processes to illustrate these ideas to promote positive change, and I’m thrilled to remind everyone once again about her vision for doing so.
In 2021, Morton won CENTER’s Environmental Award (deservedly so), so I had to contact her and pose some questions about using some truly intriguing processes to make her photographs for her The Dissolving Landscape body of work. My thanks go out to Ella for her time and for updating the last question about upcoming projects and what is next for her. I’m excited to remind you all about her and this work, so please take some time to absorb her words and images and then explore beyond this article. Peace.
Bio -
Ella Morton is a Canadian visual artist and filmmaker living in Toronto. Her expedition-based practice has brought her to residencies and projects across Canada, as well as in Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. She uses experimental analog lens-based processes to capture the sublime and fragile qualities of remote landscapes.
She earned a BFA from Parsons School of Design (New York, NY) in 2008 and an MFA from York University (Toronto, ON) in 2015. She has exhibited her work internationally, including shows at Hanstholm Art Space (North Jutland, Denmark), Walnut Contemporary (Toronto, ON), Foley Gallery (New York, NY), Contemporary Calgary (Calgary, AB), Galérie AVE (Montréal, QC), Idea Exchange (Cambridge, ON), Viewpoint Gallery (Halifax, NS), Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, WA) and the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art (Kelowna, BC).
Her photographs have been featured in Contact Photography Festival (Toronto, ON) and Exposure Photography Festival (Calgary, AB). Her films have been screened at the Antimatter Media Art Festival (Victoria, BC), the Artic Film Festival (Svalbard, Norway), Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Hawick, Scotland), Peripheries Experimental Film and Video Festival (Boston, MA) and the Future of Film Showcase (Toronto, ON).
Interview -
Michael Kirchoff: Every photographer experiences that spark that drives them into the direction of image-making. How did you get your start, and what were your early influences?
Ella Morton: I started experimenting with photography as a teenager. I was always certain that I wanted to become some kind of artist, but I veered towards photography because I loved the element of surprise inherent in analogue processes. You are never completely in control of the images you're making, but sometimes the medium gives you something unexpected that makes your work better than you had originally envisioned. At that age, my experiments involved cross-processing slide film, playing around with infrared and making double exposure prints in the darkroom. As I grew up, I learned more about the rich world of alternative and historical processes and I am still learning.
As a young adult, I loved the work of Francesca Woodman, but my influences were not limited to photographers. I became very enamoured with the work of the poet Gwendolyn MacEwen – her poetry was so beautifully dark and esoteric, written exactly as I wanted my images to look.
MK: Do you have any other creative pursuits, or has photography become the one obsession that always takes precedence?
EM: Photography certainly takes a lot of precedence, but I’ve expanded my practice into filmmaking over the last couple years, and I’ve also done some public art installations in the past. All my interests ultimately funnel back into the main impulse of my work- to explore the depth of our connection with the land and the mystery that is imbued within it. I do believe that each medium has the power to express this theme in its own way there are things that a moving image piece or an immersive installation can express that a still photograph can’t, and vice versa. I try to stay open to what each medium can offer.
MK: You recently received CENTER’s Environmental Award for 2021 with your body of work, The Dissolving Landscape. Can you tell us a bit about this project?
EM: I started working on The Dissolving Landscape in 2016 when I participated in The Arctic Circle program, a residency where artists sail around Svalbard, Norway for two weeks on a tall ship. On this journey, I brought 4x5 colour film that I had soaked, or “souped” as many folks call it, in different acidic solutions. The warping effects on the film evoked both the sublime and fragile qualities of Svalbard’s Arctic landscape.
After creating this initial body of work, I realized that I could express this same concept through other alternative processes. In addition to that, I was drawn to other Northern landscapes, particularly in my home country of Canada, but also in Nordic Europe. I began experimenting with mordançage and used this process on images I captured in Finland and Canada’s easternmost province of Newfoundland in 2018. In 2019, I also traveled to Nunavut, in the Canadian Arctic, shooting both colour and black and white film, as well as Super 8mm footage for a short film project.
By 2020, I had created two short experimental documentary films, one about Nunavut and the other about Svalbard. In both, I manipulated the Super 8mm film with bleach, varnish, spray paint, soil, and coloured inks. I had narrators from each place tell stories about those landscapes, which I paired with the imagery.
Ultimately, The Dissolving Landscape is a multi-chapter, multi-medium project that speaks to our spiritual connection with the land. In making this work, I like to describe myself as a poetic activist, articulating the profundity of our relationship with the land, and the emotional complexity of its change and loss as global warming unfolds.
MK: Using an analog approach in your work certainly helps achieve the dramatic vision for presenting The Dissolving Landscape – most especially the use of mordançage. However, there is much more to this work that goes beyond the images you’ve shown through the CENTER Award. You use more than a couple of interesting techniques in the expanded work you’ve created. What is it about these analog techniques that help to inform the work you are trying to make?
EM: I feel that all these techniques evoke two things: the sublime and magical qualities of the land, and the fragility and uncertainty of its future. On the one hand, these techniques create colours and textures that make the landscape appear ethereal, otherworldly and mysterious – they express the magic that we might feel being there. On the other hand, these techniques make the image literally dissolve, mirroring how the land is dissolving through the effects of climate change.
I think the act of using analog techniques also speaks to the changes in the medium of photography itself. Now that everyone can easily be a “photographer” with their smart phone and an Instagram account, what can photography still do as an art form? How can you make an image nowadays that doesn’t already exist in a google search? Analog processes play a big part in answering these questions.
MK: Mordançage is a challenging process to control, but clearly worth the effort when applied as gracefully as you have here. What was that learning curve like for you, and do you see it moving into other bodies of work in the future?
EM: The learning curve was definitely challenging when I first started working with mordançage. The chemicals can be finicky, and the emulsion can easily break off and make a mess. What’s more, there are decisions about which images will work best with mordançage and how to print them to turn particular sections into veils. It took a while to wrap my head around all of that. Even once I had the basics down, I still needed a lot of practice to fully master the technique.
It’s possible that I might use mordançage in other bodies of work in the future, but for now I see it winding down, as I don’t like to get too entrenched in any single process. When I think of the work of artists I admire, they are constantly reinventing themselves and never sticking with a single style or approach for too long. To make good work
MK: The environment and climate change take the spotlight in this work. Is there a long-term goal or anything you’d like to achieve in addressing these issues with your photographs?
EM: I try to make my photographs show the deep, intuitive power that the land stirs within me, and I hope that others recognize this as something they have felt themselves. It is a natural extension from this to address climate change since it is such an imminent concern at this time. In some regards, my work could be seen as a lamentation for the land. However, I think my work also holds a lot of optimism and appreciation for what nature gives us, and how it will outlive us in spite of our abuses to it.
I don’t want to be overly didactic about what we should do about climate change, but I certainly try to make small changes in my own life to mitigate it – I think about what I buy, how I eat, what modes of transportation I use and how I vote as ways to reduce my carbon footprint. It’s up to every person to decide what’s feasible within their own personal circumstances in this regard. I don’t want to cast judgment on anyone, but I think it’s possible for most middle-class folks in developed countries to make informed decisions about how our consumption and actions affect the environment. Even if we’re not doing a perfect job of it, a little effort can collectively go a long way.
MK: With the proliferation of digital technology taking over the photography world, there seems to be some pushback from the analog world. We are beginning to see a trend of more and more photographers taking on historical processes. Do you feel this is exactly that, a trend, or that possibly people have a desire to return to the way we used to create work before the pixel took over?
EM: The media theorist Marshall McLuhan had a good take on this: “A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.”
In other words, digital technology is not a replacement for analog photography, instead, it is forcing analog photography to be re-imagined. Digital technology has "liberated" analog photography to be used more creatively. Once a process becomes outdated, artists naturally find more freedom to experiment with it.
Painting went through a similar “crisis” when photography was first invented in the 1800’s. Painters had to figure out what painting could do now that it no longer had the necessity of representing reality, and thus came impressionism, expressionism, cubism, surrealism, and other movements. By the same token, digital photography is forcing a re-invention of analog photography processes, and a lot of great work is coming out of that. I think this is an exciting time to be a photographer, and I don’t think the analog resurgence is a trend. Analog photography processes can offer us such beautiful alchemy that no other medium can replicate, and I think artists will continue to recognize this for many generations.
MK: I’ve always been a firm believer that our work is informed by more than our past and that the concepts of place and home are equally represented in what we create. The environment we grow up in is incredibly significant. Would you agree, and if so, how do you feel it has applied to your photography practice?
EM: It’s funny you should ask that, because it’s a question that I don’t have a solid answer for yet. Most of my work has come out of the inspiration of being in unfamiliar places, and I haven’t really made any work about the landscape I grew up in. I’m originally from Vancouver, BC, and the mountains, ocean, and big trees of that area are amazing. I think that landscape still has something to teach me that could one day turn into a project, but I haven’t figured it out yet. That being said, I think growing up in that environment imbued in me a deep appreciation for nature, and that has definitely informed my work.
MK: How do you know if you’re ever really done with a specific body of work? Do you ever go back to revisit images or collections to improve upon what you felt was previously finished?
EM: I think it comes back to the idea of staying uncomfortable – I know a body of work is wrapping up when I feel too comfortable and confident making it. My projects do often bleed one into the next, but I try to pay attention to new aspects of the landscape that I am drawn to when shooting as indications of what my next bodies of work could be. I do sometimes refer back to negatives from previous projects to experiment with new techniques, but this is often just with the intention of making tests, rather than improving or re-doing the work.
There is often pressure on artists to define their practice as a series of distinct projects, but find that my own creative process is more a matter of different places, processes, stories, and images cross-referencing each other. I can separate them into distinct projects if needed, but they’re also one continuous evolution.
MK: Anyone working in an artistic field has matured and grown over time. Is there anything you’ve discovered lately that you’d like people to know about you or your creative process?
EM: One thing I’ve learned over the last several years is how my creative process has its own rhythm- there are periods of high productivity, periods more focused on research and experimentation, and periods that are more dedicated to the art admin side of things. When I was in graduate school from 2013-15, I had to adapt my practice to regular meetings with advisors. Although their feedback was helpful, this schedule created pressure to be constantly producing. I’m much happier now as an independent artist, letting my creative process set its own timing and adapting to its flux.
Another thing I have been reflecting on lately is the importance of intuition in the creative process. I had thought about this before, but I've reflected on it a lot more since my mother passed away last year from cancer. She was a huge supporter of my art and often helped me edit my artist statements. She could always find the best way to articulate an idea, and we had so many great conversations about art and creative process. In a way, I feel that those conversations are still continuing with her now, that she puts images in my mind and feelings in my body that inform my art.
MK: We are always looking to help the up-and-coming photographer around here. Do you have any thoughts or advice for others looking to use analog or historical processes in their work?
EM: Since the analog photography community is relatively small, I would encourage folks to make connections with others online. Don’t be afraid to message someone whose work you like and ask them questions. Become a member of a community darkroom or photography organization if there’s one in your area. Find opportunities to receive constructive critique of your work, and always be looking at the work of other artists. And above all else, keep making work and submitting it. No matter how many times you get rejected, just keep trying and something will eventually come through. Persistence is more important than talent, haha!
MK: What’s next for your photography? Any new projects you have in the works?
EM: I've got several new projects in the works. I'm currently editing a short film about Newfoundland that I shot last summer. I'm also creating a new series of wet-plate collodion ambrotypes titled Procession of Ghosts. The works feature imagery from a trip I took to Antarctica last December. I break the plates and repair them with glue and gold pigment. This process references the Japanese art form of Kintsugi, where broken and repaired ceramics are thought to be more beautiful than their original state. My work speaks to the broken state of our climate, but also offers hope and optimism. I'm honestly not sure if it's an issue we deserve to be optimistic about, but somehow, that's what came through in the work.
