The Poison Garden

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