In the Shadow of Small Acts

This place-based audio-visual artwork is a pilot project that explores the relationships between human activities, the Jarrah Forest, and the smaller life forms inhabiting Noongar Boodjar in the South-West of Western Australia. It asks: What does it mean to coexist with an environment and truly listen to the land, rather than attempt to dominate it?

Presented at the Centre for People, Place and Planet’s (Edith Cowan University, WA) strategic retreat, held at the Jarrah Forest Lodge near Dwellingup, the piece unfolded as a soundscape experienced through synchronised headphones. The artwork began inside the ‘leisure room’, where participants tried to hit projected images of the Polyphagous Shot-Hole Borer, projected on one half of a table tennis table. Their shadows obstructed the images, making the task difficult. Fifteen iPads, passed between participants, featured video art made from archival footage on themes like logging, mining, the town centre, historic fires, and war prison camps in the forest. The second half of the experience took place outside, in the dark, at the foot of a circle of trees.

The work highlighted the presence of the Polyphagous Shot-Hole Borer, a tiny beetle native to Southeast Asia now present in Western Australia. This beetle, in partnership with fungi, weakens trees, demonstrating how small organisms can disrupt entire ecosystems. The piece draws parallels between this biological disruption and colonialist exploitation of the land, symbolised by the chopping down of a Jarrah tree in 1829, an act of possession by British settlers.

The artwork shifts to my attempt to record the soil’s frequencies, hoping to capture the vibrations of the critters, mycelium, and insects beneath the surface. What stories, I wondered, are being told that we cannot hear? The answer, I realised, lies not in what is captured but in the act of listening itself. The practice is relational, inviting participants to attune to the land, not to consume sounds but to acknowledge the ongoing life cycles surrounding them.

The piece is not a manifesto but an act of care—for the land, the critters beneath, and the participants, whose perceptions of their surroundings are subtly shifted. It concludes with an invitation for participants to remove their headphones and engage with the natural environment, recognising their place within the broader ecological web.