Ecologies of dark, light, and time: a material poetics of human-animal encounters in the city

This studio-led research investigates encounters with nonhuman animals in the city at night. Based in photography, the project explores how light defines the forms of the city from the darkness that surrounds it, then follows the sources of this light back to extractive mining and traces how brown coal is connected to ecosystems across deep time. Through visual poetics I show how energy and matter are entangled in common experiences of the nocturnal city to reveal interconnections between human life and the nonhuman world in ways that aim to reveal new ways of visualising and understanding the environmental crises unfolding around us. The research project outcomes are the development of a contemplative body of work where the poetic possibilities of images arrayed as installations, or across the structure of a book open new vistas on how time and space redefine ecologies. By using photographic images to reveal the significance of nonhuman material agency in the city and beyond, the project offers an innovative interpretation of current ecological decline and suggests new ways of imagining ecosystems across time.