Artist David Ellingsen has been a part of the Provide family of artists and artisans going back to our first shop on Beatty Street over 15 years ago. His body of work includes both environmental projects that explore the mounting extinction and climate crisis in B.C., as well as his stunning landscape photography, the latter of which will be a part of a new exclusive exhibit at our Gallery in September. We chatted with David from his home studio in Victoria, B.C.

Your previous show at Provide was called Drift, and your new one this September is Homeward Drift: Belonging to place. Do you consider one to be a subset of the other?

They’re related, because my work is bound by place, the Pacific Northwest, and the Salish Sea in particular. I was born and raised on Cortes Island.

I spent two months shooting all these new works over the winter, and that was really precipitated by events last November; the American election results, coupled with the IPCC [the International Panel on Climate Change that keeps track of all of the temperature and political considerations around increasing climate and climate change] – announcement that the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and keeping global warming beneath that, was dead in the water. 

So that was November for me, and as an artist who engages with a lot of environmental issues, those are the old ‘one-two’ punch. I just needed a break from working so much on all of these environmental issues, and go back to the land and find restoration of some type…don’t we all right now? 

So that was the genesis of this new work. I spent time circumnavigating the Salish Sea and then heading out along the coast, from Victoria up to Port Renfrew, and out to the Pacific Rim National Park near Tofino and Ucluelet. They’re all places I have visited time and time again over my 55 years, and they never fail to bring that restoration to me as a human being, which I think pretty much every coastal British Columbian can relate to.

And how does this body of work fit into your bigger environmental projects? 

To be honest, this landscape work is the body of work that has been a distinct through-line for the 25 years I’ve been a photographer. I started in Vancouver as a commercial photographer, and before I got into that, I was doing landscape photography, starting on Cortes, with my Hasselblad on black and white film and making these long-exposures of the seascapes in front of the farm where I was raised. I’ve really been committed to my environmental practice for the last 15 years, but it is the landscape work that has been the foundation of it all.

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And how does being born and raised on Cortes Island inform your work? 

I return to that again and again and again. That’s the foundation of my career: being raised from birth on Cortes on this 96-acre organic farm on the ocean, mostly forested. And we are literally those country kids who would leave in the morning and then come back for lunch and then run back out again and come back for dinner. The land is your partner throughout the day, and you find that connection immediately in those formative years. 

Even though I realize that, I’m still constantly surprised by the weight of it, that personal history. My family were the very first settlers on Cortes in 1887, the first people who lived on Cortes – colonists, of course – and started farming. That’s a pretty short history in the grand scheme of things but that’s played a lot into my work, resource extraction and colonialism and all those things that my family’s been directly involved in—at this point in our history,  in Canada and the wider world. We’re all going back to re-evaluate this history. 

I look at the benefits gained from being raised on Cortes, and having this land, which was of course stewarded by the indigenous nations  before that, and I see this throughline of all the benefits that I’ve had from this life within a colonial family, like most of Canada –we’re all in this situation – but it’s given me an interesting foundation from which to think about my work and its place in the world, how earlier cultures stewarded the land over millenia. And of course, this is a microcosm of what’s happening all around the world. There’s a lot to unpack, investigate, and put back into my environmental projects. 

But it is the landscape work that provides me with a sense of restoration, a sense of peace. It also provides me with the foundational reason for why I’m doing all the environmental work – it’s to protect the land. And so, there’s this symbiotic relationship between these two streams in my overall practice. 

Can we talk a little bit about you process? What does a typical day of shooting look like for you?

I definitely prefer shooting in the winter, from fall to early spring. The lighting conditions are my favourite…we all know those silver days we have here in B.C., overcast, bright, but beautiful and low contrast. I wait for those times, dawn and dusk in particular. I prefer dusk a little bit more these days because I’m getting older and need my sleep. 

I map out locations that I want to revisit, or sometimes investigate familiar places more deeply– for instance, Quadra Island, right next to Cortes, where my brother lives. I went and stayed and took care of his homestead for a week, and from this home base, photographed all around Quadra, which I had never closely explored before. 

I’m usually out for most of the day. Once you come upon a scene that you want to photograph, it’s a lot of walking along the beaches, which is no hardship. I mean, part of the process is exactly that – being on these gigantic windswept beaches that we all know so well here, and at that time of year they’re fairly quiet. I look for that quiet and that calm and that solitude, and if it’s a busy place, I’ll leave, and return the next day. 

If I find a scene that I want to record, I’ll set up my camera on a tripod, because they’re long exposure – I’d say typically around 30 seconds, sometimes down to 20, sometimes as long as two minutes. I compose the photograph, and then set the timer, and then you just sit there beside the camera during the exposure, and all the seconds are gathering onto the sensor – film in earlier days. I just sit still and watch what’s happening. I’ve done it long enough now I can pretty much picture in my mind what the photograph is going to be like. How high are the waves? How fast is the wind going? How fast are those clouds moving over there on the far horizon, as opposed to the clouds closer up? And how is that all going to appear? I do it multiple times to make sure I get a good exposure – I spent all this time getting there and setting up, I want to collect as much as possible.

There is a real present-moment experience that you’re putting yourself into for these times when you’re walking the beach. Is that always part of your life, or does it zone in more when you’re in these natural spaces?

I think that’s pretty much my modus operandi for my life—focusing and paying attention to what’s in front of me. I have a friend, Monica, who’s a writer, and on her fridge is Mary Oliver’s line, “Pay attention, be astonished, and tell everyone.” I sometimes I think that literally sums up my career, paying attention to the rest of the non-human world. 

What do you hope viewers will experience when they’re engaging with this work? 

I find these photographs peaceful and calm, and I find they give me the space to contemplate and think about the world at large. And so, in many ways, I really hope that they bring that to the viewer in some way. We have these primal connections, connections to the natural world when we’re in places like the forest or beach, especially where there are fewer people, and we can reconnect a little bit – whether it’s a conscious process or not – reconnect with our natural origins. Perhaps a small return to being embedded within the natural world. I mean, we’re natural creatures too. But let’s face it, our civilization, we’ve attempted to removed ourselves from the rest of the natural world. And we’re doing great damage to that world.

And why did you choose to show it at Provide?

When Robert and David opened up the store on Beatty Street, they knew me through social connections. It was through that community in the West End of Vancouver that they came upon my work and they showed my very first environmental project, Future Imperfect. There’s not a lot of opportunities where people immediately want to show your work, jump right in and get going…I’ve been there ever since. 

I had a gallery in Vancouver for a while, but we parted ways, and I stayed with Provide – they’re just so wonderful to work with. They’ve got an interesting group of clients, sophisticated people who come there and find interesting things that David and Robert, and now David, have collected from around the world. And they run things thoughtfully and with great care. They’re great people – they do an amazing job within their world, and I am proud to be a part of it. David’s given me the freedom to show him new work all the time bring new stuff in, and they’ve just been this constant support for, wow, 15 years now. It’s been a really, really wonderful relationship for me as an artist. 

David Ellingsen
HOMEWARD DRIFT 
Belonging to a place

On view at Provide from September 17 until late October 2025

Provide Design Gallery 101 – 1636 West 2nd Ave.  Vancouver