Adele Wilkes
(b. 1980, Bundjalung Nation/Lismore, New South Wales. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne)

Adele Wilkes is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. Her practice encompasses moving image, photography, sound, projection and installation, with a particular focus on expanded, experimental, poetic and speculative modes of documentary and cinematic storytelling.

The Poison Garden (2021-23) – 47:27min, single channel HD video, courtesy the artist.

A Dark Spell Slowly Fading (2021) 11:20min.

A full moon illuminates a night garden of intoxicating plants. Microscopic seeds ward off the evil eye and glow in ultraviolet, iridescent insect vision. Sunlight bathes the tree of chills, pages of an ancient herbal turn, flames flicker while machine ghosts are summoned through waves and ether.

Whelm (2021) 11 minutes 20 seconds

The flicker fusion threshold of birdcalls stretch perception of the fourth dimension. Tales unfold of a distant valley where angelic species mutate and shamanic gifts reveal a diaspora of language, genes and empirical knowledge. Collectively unconscious mandalas and numinous, shapeshifting molecules make way for dissolution of the ‘I’.

Telepathine (2022) 12 minutes 44 seconds

Serpentine dreams, coils and vines wind and reverberate through the forest; the grandmother listens to songs and teaches in return as two mysterious healers dance intimately in a potent union. A stimulating conversation of smoke, thunder and interspecies seduction leads to a multidimensional meditation on the animate and inanimate.

Flood Flowers (2023) 12 minutes

La Niña brings a deluge to saturated soil, yet flowers and foliage persevere. As delicate threads to the outside world disintegrate, a petrichor palimpsest of conversations fill the void. An alien beauty reflects its heady perfume in the dark, a synaesthetic synthesis of the ephemeral, elusive and ineffable.

All recording, post production, sound design and images by Adele Wilkes.
Everything contained in these films was recorded entirely on location in the poison garden between 2021 and 2023.

Special thanks:
The poison garden, Des and Erik, Lila Lowe,John Wilkes, Colin Munro, Ceri Hann, Anita Spooner, Mikala Dwyer, Philip Samartzis, Christian Capurro, Jonathan Carmichael, Rowan Jackson Dawson, Bodhi Seed, Jeremy J, Francis Macindoe, Denis Shaw, Neil Pike, Caine Barlow, Darklight.

The Poison Garden appeared in Community Hall on 3–9 April 2023.