Leo Murray

Agriculture is routinely perceived as bucolic, benign or beneficial, while behaviours of wild species are often understood as reflecting natural patterns. Anthropogenic underpinnings of food systems and animal behaviours can be invisible in standard cinematography without multi-modal cues to increase perception and prompt deeper understandings of less apparent forces. In Grained responds to the need for creative, practice-led research inquiry to prompt deeper interpretation. An interdisciplinary collaboration spanning landscape studies, sound design, filmmaking and performance reveals how industrial food systems reconfigure place, species relations and crucially, our perceptions of such entanglements. Focused on the Ord River Irrigation Scheme on Miriwoong and Gajirrabeng Country, this original audiovisual work stages deceptively bucolic drone footage of sorghum harvesting contrasted by suggestive glitching visual intrusions and a two layer sound design with scripted performance. Visual and sonic material suggests layered socioecological infrastructures—remaking catchment scale ecologies for freshwater capture and redistribution, visible and hidden architectures of industrial agribusiness, empire and racism, labour and capital flows, and multispecies codependence on agri-systems. In Grained combines original and archival cinematography, place-attuned sound design, scripting and acted audio performances and gallery staging with dedicated props to invite sustained, embodied attention and slow contemplation. It was exhibited at Form Gallery in Claremont, Perth, 30 Oct–25 Nov 2025 in an exhibition titled ‘Transversal’, curated by Moving Image Lab Perth (MILP). Eleven artists works’ spanned video art, expanded cinema, and experimental documentary, and were refined during a laboratory residency.

Australian playwright David Finnigan's Scenes from the Climate Era is a controversial and exciting new work exploring climate change's impacts and trajectories through a series of postmodern vignettes. This production combined pedagogical inquiry and practice-based innovation to explore how the original black box theatre staging at Belvoir Theatre, Sydney, could be reimagined into an immerse multimedia experience. Murdoch University's final year Theatre and Creative Production students performed in-the-round in a white box Sound Stage illuminated by three sides of original video scenography created by Dannon Wu. Research outcomes include new scenographic methods incorporating historical footage, animation, soundscape by Leo Murray and lighting by Tim Brain to enhance the audience's sensory experience of the play and its ecological messaging.

Anthropoiesis is a soundscape installation created for the 2023 Venice Biennale containing poetic spoken word, music, location sound recordings, and sonifications inviting us to reconfigure our relations with time, space and existence in the Anthropocene age. It asks: what does it mean to live enfolded by deep time when humans have become a new geologic agent? Given that poiesis is to make, transform, or bring forth, how can we reimagine our geologic future? Where is beauty to be found amidst the terror of biodiversity loss and climate change and how can we create a sublime poetics of kin-making? This assemblage of ‘sound debris’ combines organic and human-constructed landscapes recorded on sites across Western and Central Australia and beyond. These reflect the many scales and layers of more-than-human existence, from the granular to expansive. Sounds are layered with new writing and text adapted from David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics (2019).

The Island of Rottnest is commonly known to Nyungar people as Wadjemup, meaning "place across the river". Located approximately 18 km off the coast of Western Australia, near Fremantle, it is world renowned as a tourism precinct. Less well known is its hidden history related to Aboriginal incarceration, dispossession and death. Funded via the Australian Research Council this docu-drama investigates and examines the Nyungar cosmology and spirituality related to the Island and its cultural significance to Nyungar knowledge and history.