Artist Statement

Adelaide’s practice stems from an interest in the ecologies that exist beyond the ranges of human sensory spectra, and from a desire to regularly molt and regrow perceptual habits. With an understanding that these habits are taught and learned, they seek to deprioritize the capitalist logics that fuel objectification, ecocide, violence and apathy– instead looking to more-than-human cohabitants as teachers of what else is possible. This research often takes form through experimentation with scale—repositioning themselves within the context of the movement and change enacted by the plants, animals, insects and soils within their respective ecological circuits.

Their work takes form through a push-and-pull between multi-sensory research and installation–combining field recordings, sculpture and sensory technology to illuminate the place-making intelligence of more-than-human cohabitants. This research is not exclusive, either,  of those ecological components often reduced by classical western science to non-living matter, such as steel, stone, electricity and water. In recent research, Adelaide has worked with  environmental sensors to detect changes in light, humidity and temperature values, as a way of thinking through the perspectives and needs of familiar plants. Often immersed in the feral ecologies of medians, transition zones and in-betweens, Adelaide is interested in challenging dominant notions of material absence. Recent works have grown from their field recordings from such sites– reiterating and relaying tactile, felt sounds through the context of new materials and at new scales, encouraging a sense of trans-species sensory empathy.  Their attention is currently held within the sonic-ecological impacts of highways and other human-centric infrastructures in urban Albuquerque and the Blackland Prairie ecoregion of Texas. Adelaide does not think of their work as the creation of something new, but rather as a practice of repeatedly and habitually noticing what is already there– positioning themselves and their audience at eye level with their surrounding vibrant matter.