Elizabeth Ellenwood, Arctic Reefs 1, 2025

Elizabeth Ellenwood and Kelsey Miller approach the environment through acts of looking, collecting, recording, and creating. Though their practices emerge from different mediums and methodologies, both artists are deeply connected to the ways landscapes and seascapes hold evidence of change. Their work asks us to consider water, ice, mud, and debris as materials that carry memory, curiosity, and ideas. Both artists reflect a shared impulse to slow down and pay attention through their practice. Ellenwood looks outward through the lens, while Miller works through physical contact and accumulation; both transform encounters with the environment into visual records that are personal and scientific. 

Surface/Shoal considers landscape not as a fixed backdrop, but as a living, shifting archive. The works reveal environments in states of transition and ask what it means to bear witness to those changes. In bringing these two practices together, the exhibition creates a space for contemplation: a place to consider our physical and emotional relationship to the environments we inhabit and the traces we leave behind.