About 

Agriculture is routinely perceived as bucolic, benign or beneficial, while behaviours of wild species are often understood as reflecting natural patterns. Anthropogenic underpinnings of food systems and animal behaviours can be invisible in standard cinematography without multi-modal cues to increase perception and prompt deeper understandings of less apparent forces. InGrained responds to the need for creative, practice-led research inquiry to prompt deeper interpretation. An interdisciplinary collaboration spanning landscape studies, sound design, filmmaking and performance reveals how industrial food systems reconfigure place, species relations and crucially, our perceptions of such entanglements.

Focused on the Ord River Irrigation Scheme on Miriwoong and Gajirrabeng Country, this work stages deceptively bucolic drone footage of sorghum harvesting contrasted by suggestive glitching visual intrusions and a two layer sound design with scripted performance. Visual and sonic material suggests layered socioecological infrastructures—remaking catchment scale ecologies for freshwater capture and redistribution, visible and hidden architectures of industrial agribusiness, empire and racism, labour and capital flows, and multispecies codependence on agri-systems. In Grained combines original and archival cinematography, place-attuned sound design, scripting and acted audio performances and gallery staging with dedicated props to invite sustained, embodied attention and slow contemplation. Additional installation pieces utilised meat industry byproducts (features), petroleum byproducts (plastic) and agriculture byproducts (rice husks) to create 1960s style living room chairs for participants to sit and listen to the audio work. 

It was exhibited at Form Gallery in Claremont, Perth, 30 Oct–25 Nov 2025 in an exhibition titled ‘Transversal’, curated by Moving Image Lab Perth (MILP). Eleven artists works’ spanned video art, expanded cinema, and experimental documentary, and were refined during a laboratory residency.