Joel Sherwood Spring
Born 1992, Gadigal Country, Sydney, Australia
Lives and works in Gadigal Country
Wiradjuri
UNSW Galleries and White Bay Power Station
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.
Joel Sherwood Spring is a Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist, who works collaboratively on projects that sit outside established notions of contemporary art & architecture attempting to transfigure spatial dynamics of power through discourse, pedagogies, art, design and architectural practice. He is focussed on examining the contested narratives of Australia’s urban cultural and Indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation. Sherwood Spring wishes to frame his practice within a larger framework in which he is negotiating and learning to employ art making and exhibitionary practices, publication, discourse and pedagogy within what is largely recognised as black or Indigenous studies. His works explore the potential of Indigenous materialist readings of Art and Architecture towards the efforts of repatriation, reparations and land back.
Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.