The Poison Garden (2021~) is an expanded, experimental, multimedia documentary project centred around the relationship between a psychedelic botanic garden, the reclusive polymath couple who for many years has planted, tended, imbibed, and inhabited it, and the ever-expanding library and generative conversations that inform its existence.

Considering diverse ontologies that counter anthropocentrism, The Poison Garden investigates non-hierarchical, multidimensional expressions of the complex interrelationships between the human and the ‘more-than-human’. It looks into the histories of ethnobotany (the study of human-plant relationships), psychonautics (the exploration of consciousness through first hand experience and experimentation, particularly aided by the use of plant entheogens, meditation, sound and ritual), and traces connections between alchemy, mysticism, chemistry, and various animistic cosmologies.

This project is a multidisciplinary, multimedia exploration of ways to encompass an expanse of ideas relating to consciousness, sensory perception, ecology and our place within the natural world. It responds to an understanding that much of contemporary human society under late capitalism is defined by anthropocentrism, individualism and exceptionalism. The resulting disconnect from nature and its abject exploitation has led to what is widely referred to as the Anthropocene, a period characterised by human-caused environmental catastrophe.

Combining moving image, sound, photography, installation, and online archives, The Poison Garden reflects the infinite and intricate relationships and cycles that both sustain and destroy life.

To date, The Poison Garden has produced four film works: A Dark Spell Slowly Fading (2021), Whelm (2021), Telepathine (2022), and Flood Flowers (2023). The first two were exhibited in Still Life at Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne, from 3 June—30 October, 2022, with excerpts screened 24/7 on the gallery’s public ‘Big Screen’ throughout the entirety of the exhibition. The third part was exhibited from 3 August—3 September, 2022, at Composite: Moving Image Agency & Media Bank, Melbourne, and all four screen daily in Melbourne Now at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, 3-9 April, 2023.

This body of work is currently being developed through a PhD at the School of Art, RMIT, Melbourne.

A Dark Spell Slowly Fading, 2021 (single channel HD video, stereo sound)

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 (single channel HD video, stereo sound)

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 (single channel HD video, stereo sound)

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 (single channel HD video, stereo sound)

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.

A door through the crevice of which the moonshine peeps in, 2024 (single channel HD video, stereo sound)

Cinema of negative space for the dark caesura, the long blink, the mind’s eye. Listening to / as a tree.

Soft Fascination, 2025 (three channel 4K video, stereo sound)

A wordless audiovisual meditation in contemplation and appreciation of the myriad beings inhabiting the poison garden, inviting silence, stillness, and sensory connection.

Credits:

Film production, post production, sound design and photography by Adele Wilkes.

All images and sounds contained in these films were recorded entirely on location in the poison garden between 2021 and 2023.

Flood Flowers: audio excerpts of instruments played by Bodhi Seed.

Special thanks:

The poison garden

Des and Erik

Lila Lowe

John Wilkes

Denis Shaw

Colin Munro

Curtis Moulton

Anita Spooner

Fiona Hillary

Mikala Dwyer

Philip Samartzis

Ceri Hann

Christian Capurro

Jonathan Carmichael

Rowan Jackson Dawson

Bodhi Seed

Jeremy J

Neil Pike

Francis Macindoe

Caine Barlow

Jordan Lacey

Darklight

Channon Goodwin

Tessa Laird

Composite: Moving Image Agency & Media Bank

Buxton Contemporary

National Gallery of Victoria

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia

Artspace at Realm

Yarra City Arts

Filmed in East Java (Indonesia), Melaka (Malaysia), and Melbourne (Australia), this experimental dance film dissolves the lines between documentary and fiction, performance and trance, dream and memory, time and place, self and other.

Equally visceral, wild and tranquil, it is a visual poem and ritual of loss, longing, catharsis and rebirth.

In Becoming Imperceptible, two dancers – Tony Yap and Jack Riley – are guided by Javanese “bull trance master”, Agus Riyanto, in a series of animistic possession rituals. Channeling energies that suggest other species or “more-than-human” beings, their bodies writhe, contort and transform through both serene and frenetic entries into trance states, induced by movement, breath and intense sensory stimulation.

Separated by 40 years in age, and vastly different cultural backgrounds, the two performers find intimate synergy in their shared desire for physical and spiritual transcendence through dance. The film captures performances of trance across three countries, merging elements of traditional and contemporary culture.

Credits:

Directed and produced by: Adele Wilkes

Performance: Tony Yap, Jack Riley and Agus Riyanto

Concept: Adele Wilkes, Tony Yap and Jack Riley

Spoken Word: Tony Yap

Camera and sound recording: Adele Wilkes

Editing and effects: Adele Wilkes

Sound design: Adele Wilkes and Reuben Lewis

Sound Mix: Reuben Lewis

Music composed and performed by:

Reuben Lewis (trumpet and electronics), Scott McConnachie (saxophone), R. Ay Sri Kadaryati Ywandjana (vocals), Unen Unen Rengel

Special thanks:

The arts community of Batu, Indonesia

Agus Riyanto and Anjani Batik Galeri

MAPFest Tony Yap Company

Testing Grounds, Melbourne

Sagitama Krisnandaru

Yuli Hartono

Filmed in:

East Java, Indonesia

Melaka, Malaysia

Melbourne, Australia

2023-2024

An early development stage of this work was screened at MAPFest, Melaka, Malaysia in August 2023, and excerpts were projected during the live performance ‘Animalising; Becoming Animal / Intense / Imperceptible’ in Midsumma Festival, Melbourne, Australia in February 2024.

Becoming Imperceptible (2024)

13 minutes

Single channel digital video, stereo sound

Of Rats and Roses (2014~) is a documentary film and photographic project following the life and transformation of Milly Rose, a flamboyant and highly inventive punk with a love for dressing up and gift for gutter-mouthed and brutally candid storytelling.

Backdropped by the street and night life of Melbourne’s inner northern suburbs - in particular the queer performance art community - Of Rats and Roses is a vision of a time and place that celebrates individual creative expression even in the face of danger and adversity.

From a youth marked by institutions and life on the streets, through six decades of Australian subcultures, to her current evolution, Milly Rose’s story contains many chapters and transformations - a work in progress compelled by irrepressible dreams.

This long term project is currently ongoing.

See ofratsandroses.com

'The dances they will be doing as small children today are the ones that they will carry with them and continue to dance throughout their lives. These are the inma that our grandfathers and grandmothers entrusted to us to hold and pass on. We hold this inma in our minds and in our spirit, so that we can sing, we can dance, we can give them to the children of the future. So it is for our children that we are most excited. We are going to be dancing for them, for the children' - Rene Kulitja (Aboriginal Australian artist, Director of Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Womens' Council, senior community representative and cultural custodian)

On 25 October 2019, Uluru - a place of great spiritual significance to its Traditional Owners, the Aboriginal Anangu people of Australia's Western Desert region - was officially closed permanently as a tourist climb. This historical event followed decades of work by many of the Traditional Owners to establish respect for Uluru and share an understanding of Tjukurpa, the ancient laws that have been learned over many generations through inma - traditional song and dance.

During the week of the climb’s closure, as crowds of tourists queued to conquer Uluru’s summit, hundreds of Anangu from communities across Central Australia reunited at the closed community of Mutitjulu at the eastern end of Uluru. Inma documents three days of ceremony following the closure, coinciding with the anniversary of the handback of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta lands to the Anangu in 1985.

Focusing in particular on female performers, the series is a testament to the cultural leadership of senior Anangu women and the legacy they strive to pass on to younger generations.

This project has been made possible by the invitation and support of the Anangu owned and operated Aboriginal arts collective, Maruku Arts.

The first image on this page, Ruby James - Uluru Inma (2019), was selected as a finalist in the 2021 National Photographic Portrait Prize, exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, until January 2022, and subsequently exhibited around Australia at the following galleries:

Intersection Gallery, Burnie, Tasmania, 3 March 2022 – 27 March 2022

Redland Gallery, Cleveland, Queensland, 13 May 2022 – 19 June 2022

Goldfields Art Centre, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, 1 July – 22 August 2022

Bay Discovery Centre, Glenelg, South Australia, 20 October – 12 December 2022

A portrait of a town under the spell of a lucid dream, Tasogare documents the uncanny threshold between day and night and the ways time is revealed though processes of entropy, cycles of nature, movement and ceremony. An impressionistic audiovisual poem moving from light into dark, reflecting the syncretism of Buddhist and Shinto philosophies and Japanese folklore.



The work features Australian performance artist Mark Kleine as a character inspired by the transgender Shinto deity Ishi Kore Dome, 16th generation Japanese tea ceremony master Fuyuko Kobori performing chanoyu, biwa musician Kenji Mizoguchi playing to a chorus of cicadas, and artist Yuki Negishi performing Bon Odori.

Tasogare was exhibited as an installation in a 280 year old former sake brewery in Onishi, Japan in April 2017 and premiered as a single channel video at ACMI, Melbourne, as part of the Video Visions program curated by Channels Festival, in September 2017. 

Tasogare (2017)

10 minutes

Single channel digital video, stereo sound

A silent meditation on the passing of time, Mono No Aware was filmed every day over a span of three weeks to capture the life cycle of sakura in rural Japan. The structure of the composition - images change at five second intervals - reflects the five-petaled structure of the flower and the relentless and inevitable procession towards death and renewal.

This work was exhibited in Onishi, Japan in 2017 and is in the permanent collection of Shiro Oni Studio.

Mono No Aware (2017)

6 minutes

Single channel digital video

Post_Lyfe (2020~) is an international collaborative feminist/femme/non-binary work in development incorporating Virtual Reality, video art, manga comic and soundtrack.

Referencing the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it’s a wild ride in a drift car traveling at high speed, encountering demons, apparitions and sages along an infinite journey looping through the afterlife.

In collaboration with Thea Baumann, Halszka Masash, Queenie Chan, Anita Fontaine and Nithya Nagarajan.

Still and moving images by Adele Wilkes, featuring Kimberley Little, Elle Shimada, and Aarti Jadu. VR headset created by Rachel Jessie-Rae.

In development.

Electric Dream Machine is a contemporary, digital update to Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s analog 1961 Dreamachine – a perforated cylinder that produces a strobe effect as it revolves on a turntable. The original work was inspired by new discoveries in neuroscience, and the belief that viewing these patterns of light generates neural oscillations that can heighten consciousness and creativity.

Electric Dream Machine explores ways the mind can be physically transformed by external stimuli, without altering its chemistry. It is designed to induce a meditative or hallucinatory state in the viewer’s brain through the use of alpha wave stimulating frequencies of sound and light. The work acts as a mirror in that the viewer experiences the same audiovisual frequencies as the woman in the video, potentially even syncing to her brain waves.

Curated by ACMI for Sydney Contemporary 2015, exhibited as a single channel video installation at House of Bricks Gallery (Melbourne) 2014, and large scale public single channel video for SPAN at City Library curated by the Food Court ARI (Melbourne).

Electric Dream Machine (2015)

4 minutes / looped

Single channel digital video, stereo binaural sound

Seven Laws reconfigures long takes of natural landscapes as a response to the anxieties of living in the Anthropocene. It is a contemplation of nature and its subtle processes.

The footage was filmed on a Japanese mountain once occupied by logging companies, and at Thirlmere Lakes, Australia, the ancestral home of the Indigenous Dharawal and Gundungurra people, until recently a body of water thriving with life, now completely drained due to mining and industry. In both locations, trees are sacred in the local traditional lore - the cedar is revered as home to spirits in the Shinto religion, the sakura tree is a Buddhist metaphor for ephemerality, and acacia and eucalypts are both medicines and protectors in Aboriginal Australian traditions.

Music composed and performed by Francis Macindoe and Jose PIncheira.

Seven Laws (2019)

8 minutes

Single channel digital video, stereo sound

The video work Sellisternium takes the idea of a ritual gathering of feminine deities and collapses the boundaries between ancient, contemporary and future incarnations of mythology.

In a shadowy room outside of time, spirit beings create and destroy, playing with the continuous thread of dreams, nightmares and visions that connects humankind to the mysteries of existence.

This work was commissioned and presented at Found Festival 2015, Melbourne, Australia.

Sellisternium (2015)

11 minutes

Single channel digital video, stereo sound

force / field is a movement ritual based on the symbolism and structure of the King Wen sequence of the I Ching (Book of Changes). The work integrates improvisation and elements of the ancient Chinese divination system to create a harmonic relationship between opposing and complementary forces.

The soundtrack uses vocal samples from a 1930s 78rpm vinyl record of Russian choirs, discovered in the composer’s grandfather’s shed. The composition is a response to this found archive, reinvented for the present.

An extended version of this work was presented during Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, 2014. A shorter version was included on a golden record designed by artist Susan Cohn as part of the Forever Now project, curated by Aphids, and presented at both the Substation, Melbourne, and Mona Foma Festival, Hobart in 2015. During the latter live presentation, the work was broadcast into deep space via satellite in Miami.

Lead artist: Adele Wilkes
Performance & choreography: Brooke Stamp
Music: Kane Ikin

https://aphids.net/projects/forever-now/

Documentation photography for Aphids by Bryony Jackson

force / field (2014)

1 minute / 4 minutes

Single channel digital video, stereo sound

Face is a kaleidoscopic documentary - a singular portrait made up of many faces - which delves into the private and public worlds of everyday human sexuality. The focus is on the people involved in Beautiful Agony, an ever-expanding collaborative art project that collates self-portraiture video recordings of orgasm faces.

Filtered through the director's experience as a participant of Beautiful Agony, initially working behind the camera and then turning the lens on herself, Face presents a collage of unique perspectives from individuals who have contributed to the project, plus the project's founder Lauren Olney and art theorist Edward Colless.

Considering Beautiful Agony as a logical development of self-portraiture in an age of accessible digital technology, the documentary explores the human face as a canvas for creative expression, and what it can reveal when recorded in an intimate way.

Commissioned by Screen Australia and ABCTV and produced by Matchbox Pictures.

Please contact to view a copy.

Face (2011)

26 minutes

Single channel digital video, 16mm, stereo sound

Viewer comments about Face from ABC Arts Message Board, February 2011:

"This was an excellent film. So rare that you get to see such purity."

"Congratulations on the beautiful doco. It was so refreshing to see sexuality on tv in all its rawness."

"Well done Adele - such a beautiful documentary. Your idea is brilliant, and I wish it was longer! I would love to see more of your visual art combined with the footage."

"The program is brilliant!!"

"Beautifully assembled. Flows so well, and doesn't give the viewer a chance to disengage for even a second… I was moved to tears by the film's conclusion. The whole viewing was such a visceral experience."

"this was the most beautiful, most moving, creative and emotive piece i've seen on TV in years. It's been a long time since i've been so transfixed by an idea, presented as well as this, in this medium… its something beautiful, challenging and engaging that you've created."

"Your control and composition of the projections was very beautiful."

"a very beautiful, thoughtful & thought-provoking film."

"Brave, impressive examination of a relatively taboo aspect of humanity."

"a very engaging and courageous piece of work."

Kala is a short observational documentary about the traditional Indigenous women's art of weaving, and making and dying fibres from plants, in the remote Daly River region around Wadeye, Northern Territory, Australia. Co-directed, filmed and edited with Sabina Maselli.

This work was screened in 2008 at Katrina Manton Gallery, Melbourne as part of the exhibition ‘Palngun Wurnangat Pepek Wurnmada’ (The Women with the Soft Hearts), featuring work from the Women's Art Centre, Palngun Wurnangat Aboriginal Corporation, Wadeye, NT.

Kala (2008)

6 minutes

Single channel digital video, Super 8mm, stereo sound