Co-curated with Olivia Koh from recess – a Melbourne-based online platform showcasing contemporary moving-image works – this series will comprise daily screenings in Community Hall. Featuring all Melbourne-based filmmakers, the films highlight the city’s breadth of talent in art-filmmaking – an expanding arena of creative practice with a bright future.

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–, is an on – going multimedia documentary project comprising four films (A Dark Spell Slowly Fading, 2021; Whelm, 2021; Telepathine, 2022; and Flood Flowers, 2023). The project tells the story of a psychedelic botanical garden and the reclusive polymath couple who care for it. At once a study of ethnobotany (the study of human–plant relationships), psychonautics (the study of altered states of consciousness – in particular using plant entheogens, meditation, sound and ritual) and an exercise in countering anthropocentrism, The Poison Garden investigates the complex and evolving relationships between humans and plants. Drawing on theories of the ‘more-than-human’, Wilkes suggests a future relationship that goes beyond caretaking, lifting the status of plants to that of humans. Combining moving image, sound, photography, installation and online archives, The Poison Garden explores the intricate relationships and cycles that both sustain and destroy life on Earth.

Wilkes’s work has been shown in Australia and internationally, including at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), MONA FOMA, Channels Festival, Aphids, Next Wave Festival, Sydney Contemporary, Magnum Photos, Liquid Architecture, Museum of Brisbane, The Hellenic Museum, Bunjil Place, Buxton Contemporary, at various film festivals in the United Kingdom, United States, and Europe, and on ABC TV. Her photographic work was shortlisted for the 2019 Bowness Photography Prize and the 2021 National Photographic Portrait Prize. She is also a member of Women Photograph, an art peer-assessor for the Australia Council for the Arts 2021–24, and a current PhD (Art) candidate at RMIT University, Melbourne.