An iridescent python winds through a subtropical playground of psychoactive plants. Where the garden merges with forest, an improvised instrument plays to ayahuasca vines entwining their arboreal supports. Known by many names, ayahuasca contains an alkaloid once referred to by Western scientists as ‘telepathine', after the collective psychic experiences that can result from its ingestion. Nymphaea ampla, the hallucinogenic water lily depicted in ancient Egyptian and Mayan art, and varieties of tobacco, widely considered the master of all sacred plants of the Americas, expand dimensions of time and space. Conversations undulate and ripple outwards, like vines and snake spines and water. Everything’s always (shape)shifting in the garden.

Telepathine is the third film in an ongoing project, ‘The Poison Garden’, which unveils the hidden world of a couple who have created a living, ethnobotanical expression of spiritual ecology and queer knowledge through a mutualistic symbiosis with the more-than-human collaborators who inhabit their home.

The first two films, A Dark Spell Slowly Fading, and Whelm, are currently showing in Still Life at Buxton Contemporary until November.

Adele Wilkes is an artist, filmmaker and researcher whose practice encompasses moving image, sound, photography, projection and installation, with a focus on expanded, experimental, poetic and hybrid modes of documentary and cinematic storytelling. Adele’s work has been exhibited, screened, published and broadcast around the world, and transmitted into deep space, by organisations including Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Channels Festival, Aphids, Sydney Contemporary, ABC TV, Magnum Photos, Mona Foma, Liquid Architecture, Museum of Brisbane, The Hellenic Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Monash Gallery of Art, Bunjil Place, Buxton Contemporary, un Magazine and film festivals in the UK, US, and Europe.