DAVID ELLINGSEN

*2017, Dissipating Heat, Summer Evenings (Study) (*2017). Pigment ink on cotton rag paper, 40 x 60 inches.

WEATHER PATTERNS (Visualizing milestones in climate breakdown)

Running from 2011 through 2024, Weather Patterns is a long-term project recording and marking events in the changing global climate system. This anecdotal archive - functioning as memory - records, encodes, and stores these milestones in an index of incremental change.

Each day I made a single photograph using a consistent set of parameters with location, focal length, aperture and framing - resulting in a sizeable archive of images. At a later date, when I become aware of a new record, I draw on this archive to create these large-scale composite works. While some individual days appear as a milestone most of these emblematic compilations combine many days into a single work, enabling the viewer to see wide swaths of historical records at a glance. Most of the final works take weeks, months or years to complete.

As climate breakdown advances, and records are broken with increasing regularity, the construction of a photo-series that enforced bearing conscious witness to the changes occurring was of particular interest to me. Indeed, there are now so many of these events occurring that it is a difficult task to keep track of them. This on-going diary enables a process of both witness and memorial to the slow violence being imposed on the natural world.

As the earth shifts into an anthropogenic, less hospitable climate, recording and acknowledging even this minuscule slice of geological history - in the transition from what may be humanity's environmental 'Golden Age' - seems a worthy task.

*2014 May, The Hottest Month of May in Recorded History (global).* Pigment ink on cotton rag paper, 27.5 x 57.5 inches.

Globally, the month of May 2014 was the hottest in recorded history. The compilation of 31 images, shown above, contains the 13 days photographed in May with the remaining days represented by pairing the closest preceding day captured with the closest succeeding. Each day is compressed horizontally.

David Ellingsen is a Canadian photo-based artist making work that centres biodiversity and raises questions around human relationship with the natural world. In partnership with these often challenging projects, turning from desecration to resilience, Ellingsen maintains a long term practice making time-based landscape photographs. For more on the artist and his work, please visit his website.