I acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which I live and work. I pay deep respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, to their Elders, past and present, and to their country. Sovereignty was never ceded and settler colonialism is ongoing.

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

Informed by her personal history and syncretic cultural identity, Adele’s practice engages with ways of being and knowing that resist dominator culture and anthropocentrism. Her current work considers the mycelial connections between psychedelic plants and fungi, visionary states, ecology, animism, perception, neuroscience, metaphysics, mythology and the nonhuman. She is fascinated by the transformative potential of collaborative, sensorial and ritual processes.

Adele’s work has been exhibited, screened, published, broadcast, and transmitted into deep space, by organisations including National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Buxton Contemporary, Channels Festival, Composite: Moving Image Agency and Media Bank, Aphids, Sydney Contemporary, ABC TV, Magnum Photos, Mona Foma, Liquid Architecture, Museum of Brisbane, The Hellenic Museum, Bunjil Place, un Magazine, Lismore Regional Gallery, Midsumma Festival, RMIT Design Hub Gallery, Melaka Art and Performance Festival, and film festivals in the UK, US, and Europe. Her photographic work was shortlisted for the 2019 Bowness Photography Prize, exhibited at the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh), Victoria, and the 2021 National Photographic Portrait Prize, exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, ACT and at regional galleries throughout Australia.

Adele has completed art residencies at Shiro Oni, Japan (2017), Centre for Dramaturgy and Curation, Australia (2019), Bantengan Nuswantara, Indonesia (2023), Pos Yum, Malaysia (2023), MAPFest, Malaysia (2023) and a photography intensive with Magnum Photos x PHOTO Festival (2021). In 2021 she was the recipient of both the Composite Moving Image Award and the Joel Elenberg Prize. In 2023, she curated the film program, ‘Chromaphilia Dreams’, for Bunjil Place, Victoria. Since 2008, she has helped run the ethnobotanical nonprofit organisation, Entheogenesis Australis (EGA). She is a founding member of Fruiting Bodies Queer Ecology Collective, a member of Women Photograph, an art peer assessor for the Australia Council for the Arts 2021-2024, and a PhD candidate in the School of Art, RMIT, Melbourne.

Adele’s films were presented in the 2023 Melbourne Now exhibition at NGV Australia as part of the Artist Film Program. Her work was featured in the Still Life exhibition and on the public Big Screen at Buxton Contemporary, June-October 2022, and at Composite: Moving Image Agency and Media Bank, August-September 2022. Her writing was published in issue 16.1 of un Magazine.

She shares most of her time between Naarm / Birraranga (Melbourne), Victoria, and the region of her birthplace on Bundjalung Country (North Coast of NSW).