TRANS-PLANTED SIGNALS: Navigating Sensory Relationships with Plants, Place, and Pathways

Single-channel video with narration, 2019–2025

​

Trans-planted Signals is a research-creation project that explores relationships between plants, place, and ecological belonging across hemispheres. Filmed in Maui, Hawaiʻi, and Boorloo (Perth), Western Australia, the work traces resonances between coastal environments connected through histories of botanical migration, colonization, and adaptation. Through embodied observation, walking, cycling, and attentive encounters with transplanted plant species, the project considers how landscapes become living archives of movement and memory. Australian trees naturalized in Hawaiʻi—including Norfolk pine, Australian pine, paperbark, and hau bush—become points of departure for reflecting on displacement, kinship, and the complex relationships between ecological and cultural belonging.

The moving image interweaves footage captured across both regions, layering coastlines, vegetation, and shifting light so that one place gradually dissolves into another. Colour inversion, overlapping sequences, and first-person narration deliberately unsettle geographical certainty, suggesting that ecological identities are never fixed but continually formed through movement, exchange, and adaptation. Rather than positioning nature as a static backdrop, Trans-planted Signals approaches plants as collaborators and witnesses, inviting viewers to consider how human and more-than-human lives become entangled through shared histories of migration.

The work was presented as part of Resonance: Dialogues in Art & Ecology, an exhibition marking the launch of the Australian chapter of ecoartspace at Painted Tree Gallery, Northcliffe, Western Australia. Curated by Sharmila Wood, the exhibition brought together artists investigating ecological relationships through contemporary art practice and was accompanied by a residency, public programs, and community engagement activities.

​

Contributing video:
Kate Goff (Western Australia)
Georgie Hunter (Hawaiʻi)