Polly Stanton, Artist/Filmmaker

Indefinite Terrains is an audio-visual essay that interprets the site of the forest plantation as a dynamic assemblage of colonialism, capitalism and country. Through the location of the plantation, the actions and effects of industry and the more-than-human world are considered through narration and the audio-visual tracing of the forest’s controlled and operationalised terrains. Based in the semi-arid goldfields region of central Victoria, and born from six months of field research, the work reimagines the planation as a convergence of events and complexities that engage beings and bodies in lively ecologies of remembrance and relation.

Punctuated with diaristic entries by the fictitious character of a ‘plantation officer’, acts of listening and looking become speculative forms of knowledge making as the shifting geographies and histories of the forest are explored. Drawing on both the subjective and the real, Indefinite Terrains presents a cinematic cartography that turns the seemingly factual site of the plantation into questions, uncertainties and imaginings: situating human endeavour as a momentary appearance in a complex and ever-changing world.

Indefinite Terrains was created with the support
of RMIT Gallery. The work was filmed and recorded on the country of the Dja Dja Wurrung, the traditional owners of Central Victoria.

Commissioned by The Cinema’s Project, The Spectral Field is a moving image and sound work that traces the delicate and hidden aspects of the ancient Mallee landscape. The work is set in the remote Murray Sunset National Park and is a speculative exploration of three ephemeral salt lakes and the surrounding infrastructure of an abandoned salt harvesting farm. Interrogating and destabilising notions of scale, The Spectral Field envisages macro and micro observations of site in response to the immensity of the Australian outback.

Drone footage, micro videography and vibrational recordings of the lakes surface disrupt our perception of the environment, mutating terrains of sensory experience by subverting known geographies. The work brings the spectral nature of the landscape and otherness of the salt lakes into focus through the situated and intimate recording of sound, giving rise to a field of vibratory resonance that is unseen by the camera frame. These spectral and sonorous underpinnings activate a space of the elemental, hinting at the deep time of the lakebed by animating the muted agencies of the past. By documenting these facets and imaginings of the land, The Spectral Field considers the Mallee as a hauntological space that is both material and meditated.

This work was supported by Creative Victoria
and The Mildura Arts Centre. The Spectral Field was filmed and recorded on the territories of the Latji Latji, Ngintait and Nyeri Nyeri Peoples. Sovereignty of this land was never ceded.

Between Two Suns is a sound and moving-image work that documents the landscape of Vallisaari and Kuninkaansaari Island: two disused military outposts located in the grey waters of the Finnish gulf. Connected by a small land bridge, the islands formed an initial line of defence for the mainland from invading forces in the early 19th century. Colonised twice, once by Sweden and then later by Russia, the islands were handed back to Finland during the Finish independence in 1917. Because of these histories, the uninhabited islands were declared contaminated zones and for decades the public was restricted from visiting the tangled web of buried artillery, underground forts and abandoned dwellings.

Over time, the environment became a wild and overgrown place, evolving into one of the most biodiverse sites in southern Finland as birds, moose, foxes and insects returned to reclaim the forgotten islands. Utilising sound and video documentation captured from the surrounding landscape, Between Two Suns creates a geo-traversal of these landscapes through movement and activity undertaken during three months of fieldwork. By attending to interstitial spaces and sites, the work explores non-linear and embodied productions of knowledge that bring forth a negotiating and reworking of the small spaces and small happenings to make something new. Through this framework the work considers what it means to move, look and listen in contested environments.

Between Two Suns was supported by
The Helsinki International Artist Program and The Australia Council for the Arts.

Undercurrents is a moving image and sound work that traces the path of water as it travels through the distinct sites of the Kiewa Hydroelectric Scheme. The work is an audio-visual mapping that documents changes of place and time over a 12 hour day – from the first moments of the dawn ice-melt, to the last stages of dusk as the current is halted by the dark water of Junction Dam. Filmed over a two-week period in the Victorian Alps, Undercurrents stages a series of sensory moments in the creation and production of water as it flows through the remote country of the Alps. Set in three main locations within the Alpine National Park, the work charts the movement of water as it cuts through thick tundra, deep river valleys and sites of industry.

Beginning with the yearly ice-pack melt, the work explores the rarely seen process the water takes as it is funnelled through a maze of underground aquifers, generators and pipes, revealing the hydro scheme as a hidden and affective element within the landscape. The title of the work refers to these layered spaces that the water passes through – a layering that is all at once cultural, political and geographical. In documenting the convergence of water, land and industry, Undercurrents considers the hidden and contained experience of landscape as it shifts through the different paradigms – above and below ground, private and public space – positioning both human and more-than-human participants in lively ecologies of labour, value and meaning. At the core of the work is a sensory interaction with landscape and the underlying geo-technical frameworks where the nature/human/culture divides collapse and become a meshwork of actions, moments and stories-so-far.

Undercurrents was filmed during a supported residency at The Bogong Centre for Sound Culture and was acquired by the Parliament House Art Collection in 2016. It was filmed on the unceeded lands of the Ngarigo peoples, the traditional custodians of the Australian Alps.

Three Rooms is an audio-visual work that documents the interior remnants of an abandoned farmhouse in the remote sub-artic region of Iceland’s Westfjords. By contemplating the contingent moments of listening and light inherent in each room, the work presents the shifting ephemera and temporalities of Iceland’s deserted country – commonly known as Eyðibýli. With thousands of empty farms scattered across the landscape, these ruins stand as a reminder of the country’s rapid societal change shaped through the commodification of natural resources and the accelerated rise of large-scale industrialization. As commercial industry drained the land of small family-owned farms, it conversely shaped a new landscape of Eyðibýli – empty spaces of material pasts and hauntological futures.

Created during a residency in northwest Iceland, Three Rooms stages durational moments that both sonically and visually explore these deserted sites. The spaces of the house act as autonomous and sentient bodies from another time, no longer dependent on human activity for their existence. Instead each room is a study in disappearance, characterised by its forsaken status. By reflecting on the neoliberal erasure of history through a sensory attentiveness to space, Three Rooms considers the silent force of dispossession and the erosion of community and place.

This work was filmed during a NES residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland. The project was supported
by the Australia Council for the Arts.