Biennale of Sydney

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White Bay Power Station

HOLECODED, 2023-2024
digital video, bolt cutters
7 minutes 5 seconds

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous assistance from Fondation Opale. Courtesy the artist.

Between the sandstone bricks that compose the terrace houses and government buildings that pepper Sydney’s foreshore, lime mortar made from the ground and burnt shells taken from Indigenous middens binds together the fabric of colonial Australia. Artist and architect Joel Sherwood Spring investigates these ideas of extraction, as industry and oppression, within the bowels of White Bay Power Station.

In the same halls that once burnt coal dug up from deep beneath Indigenous land across New South Wales to power the trams and trains that crisscrossed the state, Sherwood Spring’s new commissioned work HOLECODED explores subjective states made by, and through, digging and extraction, an experience of the plotholes extractive practices produce. Both tunnel and tunneler.

UNSW Galleries

Diggermode, 2022
multi-channel video
23 minutes

Commissioned by ACMI. Presentation at the 24th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous assistance from the Fondation Opale, as part of the collaboration to support Emerging Artists. Courtesy the artist.

In Diggermode, Wiradjuri artist Joel Sherwood Spring interrogates “how we might engage with materials differently if we think about their provenance and where they come from, where they’re extracted from, and what that means going forward”. As Indigenous lands across Australia are being mined, burnt and drained for resources, what happens to the deep archive of cultural knowledge embedded in the bedrock, floodplains, coastlines, spirits and bodies of First Nations people?

Against a background of AI-generated landscapes, mimicking the work of Arrernte painter Albert Namatjira ravaged by mining operations, Sherwood Spring asks another AI questions such as ‘Who’s your Mob?’ to test whether the archive of cultural material held online, in the cloud or museum collections, can accurately falsify Indigenous identities.

Famous sci-fi writer Phillip K. Dick once wondered if androids dreamt of electric sheep, in what is considered a ground-breaking rumination on what it is to be human. In Diggermode, Sherwood Spring asks whether the rare-earth minerals in your phone remember Country.