Wiradjuri artist Joel Sherwood Spring explores the logic and ethos of technocapitalism from a First Nations perspective. In 2023, at the Institute of Modern Art, he won the Churchie Emerging Art Prize with Diggermode, an audacious two-channel video essay which addressed mining as its subject and process. Spring returns with his sequel Diggermode 2: Cloud Ceding, an installation combining documentary and narrative filmmaking, archival materials and sculptural elements. The work revolves around Kira, a drone operator at RAAF Edinburgh, who has just bought a Defence Housing Australia house in Northwest Quarter Estate in Adelaide’s Angle Park. It traverses soldier-settlement histories, land-title registration, lifestyle vlogging, data-centre real-estate monopolies, and how Australia’s strategic position in the Pacific secures future rare-earth extraction.
Joel Sherwood-Spring is a Wiradjuri ‘anti-disciplinary’ artist, whose work examines the contested narratives of Australian history in the face of ongoing colonisation, and considers how Indigenous ways of being are impacted by capitalism’s extractive processes. Sherwood-Spring featured in Eavesdropping, at Ian Potter Museum, Naarm/Melbourne, in 2018, and City Gallery Wellington, in 2019. In 2023, he won the Churchie Emerging Art Award, and had a solo show at UTS Gallery, in Gadigal/Sydney. In 2024, he was in the Sydney Biennale and The Macfarlane Commissions at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne. He lives in Gadigal/Sydney.
Image: Diggermode 2 is a joint project with the 2026 Adelaide Biennial. It has been curated by Ellie Buttrose and Robert Leonard, and supported by Create NSW, the Keir Foundation, and IMA Commissioners Circle.
