“The Residue of Starlight” examines the desert landscapes of Northern Chile, New Mexico and Western Australia. All three locations face similar risks of increasing temperatures, droughts and wildfires as the climate crisis intensifies. All are also home to cultures that have a distinctly strong connection to the sky, stars and universe beyond Earth. Captured on a large-format camera, these photographs feature mordançage, film soup and the use of decades-old expired films. Combining these processes on the colour film plane produces otherworldly, yet tactile visuals- a collision of the tangible and intangible. Conjuring psychedelic dreamscapes, these images examine the deep rapport with the numinous that is palpable in the desert, more now that ever at this threshold of ecological collapse.
about the artist
Ella Morton (she/her) is a Canadian visual artist and filmmaker living in Tkarón:to/Toronto, on the land of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenoshaunee and the Wendat peoples. Her expedition-based practice has brought her to residencies and projects across Canada, Nordic Europe, Greenland, Latin America, Australia and Antarctica. Working primarily with lens-based media, she uses experimental analogue processes to capture the sublime and fragile qualities of remote landscapes. Reflecting on how the medium of photography is changing in the digital age, she aims to uncover how photographs can show more than a straightforward depiction of reality, and how the alchemy of analogue techniques can be reinvented in the present day to tell deeper stories within images.
