Joel Sherwood Spring
Diggermode 2
4 October–20 December 20254 Oct–20 Dec 2025
Wiradjuri artist Joel Sherwood Spring combines a First Nations critical perspective with an interest in the logic and ethos of techocapitalism. In 2023, at the Institute of Modern Art, he won the Churchie with Diggermode, an audacious two-channel video essay which explores the world mining has made. Mining—in various forms—was its subject and process.
Sherwood Spring returns to the Institute with his sequel Diggermode 2. The video-installation project combines documentary and narrative filmmaking; archival materials, 3D-generated simulations, 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. The work 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.
Diggermode 2 is a joint project with the 2026 Adelaide Biennial. It has been curated by Ellie Buttrose and Robert Leonard, and supported by Creative Australia, the Keir Foundation, and IMA Commissioners Circle.
Curated By
- Ellie Buttrose, Robert Leonard
Joel Sherwood-Spring (b.1992) 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 peoples’ 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, 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.
