About the Jury

Screening Room II

Ground

In this second room, we lift our gaze from the subterranean focus of Delve, to the Earth from surface to sky. Here, we contemplate the cycles of our planet – both natural and human-made. From the flight paths of birds to the courses of rivers, the ebb and flow of tides, and the endless movement of things, we witness human interventions woven into the fabric of natural cycles. These works reveal processes – many of which may steer us toward peril. In Ground, we contemplate how we ended up here, within a climate crisis.

Earth Tides
Bethany Johnson

Note: video contains flashing imagery

We ascend from Delve to Ground, beginning with artist Bethany Johnson, known for her strata-like sculptural work previously exhibited in Points of Return. Earth Tides is a departure for the artist – translating her excavation like techniques into moving image. The artist describes this work as “a quiet meditation on the Earth’s cycles.” Johnson developed the piece during a two-month residency at the McDonald Observatory; the work is presented as a looping video and blends scientific and informational textures with observational footage to trace planetary rhythms – respiration, tides, rainfall, seasons – alongside slower geologic processes such as sedimentation and erosion. Johnson’s broader practice frequently engages scientific imagery, which this piece uses to ask how knowledge of Earth is produced and used – for extraction, for repair, for understanding.

Under the Overpass
James DeLisio

Under the Overpass by James DeLisio follows a colony of Cliff Swallows nesting on a section of Interstate 5 above the San Dieguito River in California. The film draws attention to the often-overlooked liminal spaces of built environments, where ecological rhythms and human-made infrastructure converge. Constructed as triptych compositions of the birds in flight, their nests on the freeway, and the San Dieguito River Park, the film is accompanied by two texts: Cliff Swallows – Missouri Breaks, a poem by Debra Nystrom; and scientific paper Where has all the Roadkill Gone? Through this structure, DeLisio charts the oscillations of the swallows’ movements and explores border spaces between natural and constructed, rural and urban, and science and art. The central frame often acts as a bridge between the outer images, as in the opening sequence, where the underpass appears both as a literal passageway and a figurative crossing between entangled worlds. At times, the swallows fly seamlessly across all three frames, uniting them into a single composition.

Watching the film requires shifting attention between texts and images, which unfold at different rhythms. This oscillation mirrors the swallows’ own flight; each viewing produces different constellations of meaning, inviting the audience to join the swallows.

Draw me into your Vastness
Virginia Woods-Jack

Draw me into your Vastness explores the cycles we exist within and alongside. Woods-Jack’s film is a meditation on the ocean as an archive of memory. Shot on Super8 and developed in wakame seaweed harvested from the Te Whanganui-a-Tara coastline, the film itself is infused with the very stuff of the sea. Wakame is an introduced and invasive species in Aotearoa (New Zealand). It’s fast-growing, prolific, and disruptive to native kelp forests. Yet, as seaweed, it also belongs to the “blue carbon” ecosystems vital for absorbing carbon and producing oxygen. This paradox makes its presence here especially resonant – a plant that embodies resilience also brings ecological vulnerability.

The work began with a full-moon swim in the summer of 2024, when the artist found a handwritten note in the sand – an anonymous young woman’s aspirations and desires. Woods-Jack chose to return the words to the sea.

Trois Rives (Three Shores)
Damien Cattinari

Presented as a form of experimental documentary, Three Shores is a poetic portrait of an imaginary river. By crossing it, from east to west, or by making a detour to the south, from the undergrowth to the city, to its industrial zone, the film attempts to map the functioning and organisation of our society through the time of flowing water. The film becomes a threshold in the exhibition, carrying us into more unsettled terrain and the forces that are steadily transforming our world.

Revolutions: the Lighthouse & the Windmill
Adam Sébire

Revolutions is a call to contemplate. We encounter it within this Screening Room as a ground level technology and a symbol of our changing landscapes. In searching for aesthetic representations of the energy transition, artist Adam Sébire was drawn, moth-like, to the enormous Class 1 fresnel lantern of Utsira Lighthouse (where he was to be marooned for three months due to the pandemic). Since 2019, Utsira Lighthouse has been powered by two wind turbines at the other end of this tiny North Sea island. This ostensibly obsolete Industrial Revolution technology starts turning each day as the sun sets. A cable connects to its eastern shore where, a few metres past the island’s 9000 year-old Stone Age ruins, two windmills also turn; pivotal technologies to guarantee the islanders’ resilience (ten Utsira households became the world’s first to have electricity produced from hydrogen in 2004, electrolysed by this wind energy).

The lighthouse’s beacon, once oil-powered, is also now lit and rotated by these turbines. Here is the artist’s first attempt at linking them formalistically. Revolutionary in more ways than one, connections between the two wind turbines and lighthouse exist on levels beyond the purely electromagnetic. They are linked: symbolically (windmills and lighthouses as Romantic-era icons); formally (both are vertical structures facilitating revolution); sociologically (energy and marine safety being fundamental to the community’s resilience); and technologically (transforming and manifesting wind energy as far-reaching 1000W beams of light).

“Lighthouses are held up by philosophers such as Rousseau as examples of a ‘Common Good’ – a free service provided for the benefit of all. Might renewable energy be considered in the same way?” the artist muses. “Though windmills draw on the Commons (via air currents) they can arouse strong passions politically and aesthetically (just ask Don Quixote!) By linking these turbines directly to this icon of the Industrial Revolution, I want to open up alternative aesthetic lines of thought about the technologies underpinning our current energy transition.”

The film is a form of reflection, without drawing conclusions. “Aesthetically, kaleidoscopically, the revolutions atop these two vertical structures merge in the video as aerodynamic turbine blades are juxtaposed with beams of light filmed from a drone. It’s these 1000W beams that offer a visible manifestation of renewable energy’s potential as small communities such as Utsira seek to close the gap between the generation and use of electricity. Perhaps it’s this same proximity of energy production and consumption that explains why renewables can become so controversial? The infrastructure of power generation is often hidden, especially when we are dealing with distant fossil-fuelled power plants. But our encounters with solar and wind installations are more distributed; hence we need to think deeply about their aesthetics.”

Waiting up to Meet the Wolf
Anthony Carr

Waiting Up To Meet The Wolf is an experimental three channel short film contemplating the rapid decline of dark skies. Coalescing the past, present and future, the film weaves personal memories of the dark from the artist’s childhood and adult life, with the short-lived history of the 19th century’s once ubiquitous Moonlight Tower. These towers, alongside other social and technological changes helped shape attitudes towards darkness, which has had and continues to have huge ecological consequences. Darkness is important to all flora and fauna on our planet, we need the dark to function as much as we need sunlight. We try our best to eradicate it, but instead, our responsibility should be to preserve it in the same way we preserve and protect other habitats.   

Shot on black and white 16mm, the film has been hand-processed using experimental eco-reversal techniques which reflect the subject matter, from developing in charcoal to flashing the film with light from a car headlight. The relevance of using charcoal is two-fold; materially connecting the film to both the carbon electrodes in the original towers and to the history of photography and its use by the Lumiere Brothers’ Autochrome technique of the same time period. The film’s length is also significant, with 6 mins 40 secs or 6,400 frames of 16mm film, equivalent to 160ft which was the height of the original Moonlight Towers in Victoria (BC), where the film was made. Embedded with various levels of symbolism – most obviously the moon – the film includes the presence of unwanted light, meaning it owes its very existence to that which it laments.

Carr’s film presents an overlooked, surface-level reality that shapes our daily lives yet remains under-acknowledged. Its quiet urgency reveals how the erasure of darkness is already happening around us: an encroachment that demands attention before it becomes irreversible.

Solid Landscapes
Marcelina Maria Wellmer

In Solid Landscapes, Marcelina Maria Wellmer presents a ground-study of another type, comprising aerial and landscape footage shot in Germany, northern Sweden and Finland, documenting large-scale shifts in land use. The film moves from flights over monocultural fields to closer footage of open pits and extraction sites, reproducing and multiplying visual evidence of gradual, widespread change. Presented from both bird’s-eye and intimate perspectives, the work foregrounds processes of production and material extraction, leaving the viewer unsure whether what they see is a piece of the present Earth or a bleak, futuristic vision.

To Belong + Towards the Sun
Mats Landström

Our closing pair in Ground, by Mats Landström, both turn to the question of climate denial. Towards the Sun portrays a world on the brink of collapse. Yet paradoxically, people persist in their daily rituals as if nothing were amiss. It raises the uneasy question: are they oblivious to the gravity of their surroundings, or is their nonchalance a coping mechanism, a fragile solace in a world increasingly out of balance? In To Belong, the protagonist finds himself immersed in nature, wandering through forests and along the water’s edge. Alienated yet captivated, he navigates an unfamiliar world that is both beautiful and disorienting, embodying the subtle dissonance between human routines and the environments they inhabit.