Right: AnthropoScene XII, rear-projected onto a shopfront window in Hamburg during January 2025 for the group exhibition Contemporary Art Made of Ice.

Below: Underway are two other works that are spatially separated but linked by cause & effect (since glacial ice melt accounts for around ⅓ of all sea level rise) :

The 4-screen work that premiered at Edinburgh Science Festival in April, AnthropoScene VII: Sikujumaataarpoq (2023) is showing at Fremantle Arts Centre (Western Australia) for the Perth Festival exhibition, “Polarity: Fire & Ice” 10 Feb - 28 Apr 2024. Four-channel video, 53mins.

An immersive audiovisual installation from a remote part of Earth's melting polar circle, where water exists in solid form. Video vignettes linked by West Greenlandic words for this icy environment focus on indigenous humans & non-humans whose existence there is undergoing rapid transformation; its sound design samples ice sounds collected by scientists around the globe. Sikujumaataarpoq is a Kalaallisut word meaning "sea ice formation is delayed”. More →

• AnthropoScene II: Tideline (above) will exhibit at Abstract project

  – espace des arts abstraits in Paris 11mme, Feb-Mar 2025. It, with Roundabout #1 - triptych (below) and other prints are for sale, at the 80:20 Artist Agency which represents Adam in Leichhardt, Sydney.

• AnthropoScene IV: Adrift (∆Asea-ice) is at Beijing Natural History Museum for China Climate Action Week Sep-Oct ‘23. It asks, What if we could witness our own contribution to climate change?

• The poster image for Adrift (a man on the sea ice floe, above) was one of 9 of Adam’s images licensed by ClimateVisuals, an Oxford based charity devoted to climate communication. It’s now available to use freely via a Creative Commons license.

Current project (Utsira, NO, Feb-Mar 2025):
Revolutions: Lighthouse & the Windmills

In searching for aesthetic representations of the energy transition I was drawn, moth-like, to the enormous Class 1 fresnel lantern of Utsira Lighthouse*. Since 2019 it has been powered by two wind turbines at the other end of this tiny North Sea island.

This ostensibly obsolete Industrial Revolution technology starts turning each day as the sun sets. A cable connects to its eastern shore where, a few metres past the island’s 9000 year-old Stone Age ruins, two windmills also turn; pivotal technologies to guarantee the islanders' resilience. (Ten Utsira households became the world's first to have electricity produced from hydrogen in 2004, electrolysed by this wind energy).

The lighthouse’s beacon, once oil-powered, is also now lit and rotated by these turbines (with backup from batteries and an ageing 1MW cable to the mainland). Here’s a first attempt at linking them formalistically.

Revolutionary in more ways than one, connections between Utsira's two wind turbines and its lighthouse exist on levels beyond the purely electromagnetic. They are linked

- symbolically (windmills and lighthouses as Romantic-era icons);
- formally (both are vertical structures facilitating revolution);
- sociologically (energy and marine safety being fundamental to the community's resilience); and
- technologically (transforming and manifesting wind energy as far-reaching 1000W beams of light).

Lighthouses are held up by philosophers such as Rousseau as examples of a ‘Common Good’: a free service provided for the benefit of all. Might renewable energy be considered in the same way? Though windmills draw on the Commons (via air currents) they can arouse strong passions politically and aesthetically (just ask Don Quixote!) By linking these turbines directly to this icon of the Industrial Revolution, I want to open up alternative aesthetic lines of thought about the technologies underpinning our current Energy Transition.

Aesthetically, kaleidoscopically, the revolutions atop these two vertical structures melds in the video as aerodynamic turbine blades are juxtaposed with beams of light filmed from a drone. It's these 1000W beams that offer a visible manifestation of renewable energy's potential as small communities such as Utsira seek to close the gap between the generation and use of electricity.

Perhaps it's this same proximity of energy production and consumption that explains why it renewables can become so controversial? The infrastructure of power generation is often hidden, especially when we are dealing with distant fossil-fuelled power plants. But our encounters with solar and wind installations are more distributed; hence we need to think deeply about their aesthetics.

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*The artist was marooned for 3 months in this lighthouse from March 2020 when Australia suddenly closed its borders due to the pandemic.

• AnthropoScene VIII — Escape Velocity was WINNER of the Royal Geographic Society’s Earth Photo Prize (video award), exhibiting in London, UK, Jun-Aug 2023 before touring England. Finalist for the Nordnorsken Prize; also showing at Perth Festival 2024 (above).

• Older news: AnthropoScene III: Hellisheidi (below) won 1st prize (£1000) in The Art of Energy exhibition, Centre for Energy Ethics, University of St Andrews, Scotland and is part of Chengdu Biennale, China, Jul-Nov 2023.

• St. Andrews University’s Centre for Energy Ethics released a podcast with Adam discussing his AnthropoScenes series, art, ice, geoengineering and global warming. You can find the podcast at https://allaboutenergy.podbean.com or download above. Interview runs 12’36”-56'45".

• Points of Return is a beautifully-designed online exhibition (launched 2022) featuring artists such as Adam working working with climate change. www.pointsofreturn.org (right).

Feeling the Heat

How do climate scientists, working on the front line of a problem that's invisible to most of us, respond to it as human beings, as citizens of the planet? Feeling the Heat is presented… More →

Finalist in the CMCC Climate Change Communication Award, Nov 2023. Screenings: Premièring at Glasgow Science Centre’s Curious About Our Planet series, during the UN’s COP26 meetings there. Dec 2022 till 31 May 2023 the triple-screen work was exhibited with Adam’s thermographic stills at the Wuhan Biennial, Qintai Art Museum, China, moving to the National Natural History Museum in Beijing from Oct 2023 for China’s Climate Change Awareness Week; exhibited May-June 2023, at Umbrella Arts in Concord, MA (USA) as part of the Points of Return group show and in Linz, Austria for Klimasozial 3-30 April 2025.

Adam's artistic research & practice centres on a multi-screen form he calls the video polyptych with which he explores the vast spatiotemporal dimensions of the climate crisis – and the cognitive dissonances underlying our responses to it.  Building on his documentary background, he began a PhD at the UNSW Faculty of Art & Design, exploring aesthetic visual representations of anthropogenic global warming.
His PhD work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions including the Deutsches Museum, Max Planck Institute, the South Australian Museum and Perth Festival (WA).
He co-founded the Vertical Film Festival, the world's first competition for 9:16 films, in Australia. From 2019-20 he lectured on vertical visual forms — past, present & future — for Facebook Creative Shop in New York, Singapore, Auckland & Sydney.

CV & Research Interests →

View Art Works →

Solo exhibitions include AnthropoScenes at Galleri Svalbard (2020); In the Heat of the Moment (Accelerator Gallery Sydney, Roads to Nowhere (Head On Photo Festival/Vivid Sydney/Rocks Pop-Up). Group exhibitions include Adrift (∆Asea-ice) (2020 Waterhouse Prize finalist), Tideline at the Northern Norway Art Exhibition (2021 Critics Prizewinner), Hellishei∂i in The Art of Energy (2021, 1st prize), works in the Wuhan & Chengdu Biennales (2022-23), as well as several major works in Polarity, Fremantle Arts Centre, 2024.
Adam has directed over 25 television documentaries; the United Nations in New York premièred his film Echoes Across the Divide, later sold to broadcasters globally. Single-channel artworks include Le Violoncelle (2003), METROpolis, Camel Roundabout (2012) and Breakdown (2018). In 2016 Adam was Artist in Residence at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, in 2018 at Upernavik Museum Greenland, at SÍM Reykjavík (Iceland) 2018-19, in 2019-20 at Galleri Svalbard (Longyearbyen), and at Uummannaq Polar Institute with Nordic-Baltic Mobility Program for Culture funding in 2024.