Ella Morton – Visual Artist

Pack Ice (2025) is a public art installation at City Centre Station in Vancouver curated by Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver) in partnership with Contact Photography Festival (Toronto).

Exhibition text:

“During the summer of 2024, Canadian artist Ella Morton found herself on a journey to what felt like the end of the earth, confronting the sublime and volatile region of the northern Arctic Ocean. Pack Ice #1 and Pack Ice #2 are images created as a result of a long-term project called The Dissolving Landscape that began in 2016 during The Arctic Circle residency in Svalbard, Norway. 

Situated as murals on the glass façade of the Canada Line’s Vancouver City Centre Station, the two seemingly abstract images of the vast ocean appear to shift and crack like the polar ice packs themselves. Morton’s pursuit of experimentation and chance in her practice contrasts with the slow and precise nature of photographing with her large-format camera. The artist soaks film in acidic solutions before exposure in order to degrade the emulsion. Then, when printing the images, she uses the mordançage technique – traditionally saved for black-and-white silver gelatin prints – lifting the emulsion off the paper and creating mysterious veils and textures.

Morton’s seductive yet unsettling large-scale images are suggestive of an otherworldly portal to a remote and fragile ecosystem changing at an unnerving pace as the planet warms and sea levels rise as a result of the climate crisis.

Presented in partnership with the CONTACT Photography Festival.”

The Dissolving Landscape - Toronto Scenes with Mordançage (2020) is a commission with Artscape Atelier, in partnership with the Daniels Corporation. I created 425 small artworks for new condo owners in the Lighthouse East Tower in the Waterfront East neighbourhood of Toronto. The artworks are a series of framed, editioned prints of local scenes in the surrounding neighbourhood, treated with mordançage. The works are meant to remind viewers of the mystery that is imbued in everyday spaces, even in an urban setting like Toronto.

More information about the project can be found here:

https://www.artscape.ca/2020/09/24/artscape-atelier-and-the-daniels-corporation-commissioned-local-artists-to-provide-artworks-or-artisanal-items-to-new-homeowners/

Meteor Shower (2015/16) is a permanent land art installation located at the gate of Jyske Ås in Hjallerup, Brønderslev Municipality, North Jutland, Denmark. A part of the Land-Shape: Land Art North Denmark initiative, Meteor Shower was featured in the inaugural Land-Shape Festival in Hanstholm in June 2015. The installation consists of stones from several North Jutland municipalities, painted with high-intensity glow-in-the-dark paint. The stones are redistributed in the landscape in an expansive cluster, suggesting that a group of meteors has fallen from the sky. Absorbing light throughout the day, the rocks glow brightly at night, appearing as ghostly remnants of fiery, fallen meteors.

In 2021, Meteor Shower will be moved to the Planet Trail in the nearby town of Klokkerholm.

Somewhere Strange (2016) was a temporary window display featured in Roadside Attractions, a series of public art installations curated by We See Inc. (Roy Kohn and Kate Vasyliw) in Toronto. The work consists of a mosaic of postcards in the background with a haiku poem in the foreground. The letters of the poem are cut out from postcards which blend with the background to create an optical illusion. The poem reads:

You are somewhere strange.

Do not be surprised if you

Sleep through the alarm.

The postcards address the disparity between how places are idealized versus the visceral experience of passing through them. The haiku asks the viewer to consider the nature of reality and the sublime strangeness of the world, and to reflect on dreams, waking life, the familiar and the unexpected.

Fortune (2012) was a temporary mural made up of eight messages from fortune cookies, arranged together to create a superfluously happy public message. This work was created as part of The Crying Room mural series, curated by Colleen Heslin, and was displayed in the downtown eastside of Vancouver during February 2012, concurrent with Chinese New Year.

You Are Here (2011) was an interactive walk along the waterfront in Halifax, where participants followed a series of glow-in-the-dark phrases posted on railings, benches and other structures within the environment. The phrases intended to create an appreciation of the mutability of the city, the ocean and the immediate surroundings. This project was created for Nocturne: Art At Night, 2011.