Essay

The Permeable Membrane: Ecological Consciousness and Somatic Re-Entrainment in the Practice of Andrei Jewell

At a moment when the discourse around ecological crisis has largely exhausted its capacity to move through the register of information — when the proliferation of data, documentation, and moral appeal has produced not mobilisation but what Glen Albrecht has termed solastalgia, the chronic psychic distress of a species estranged from its own living ground — the question of what art can do becomes urgent and specific. It is not enough to represent the crisis; representation has proven insufficient. What is required is work that operates at the level where the crisis originates: in the perceptual and somatic dissociation of the modern Western subject from the natural world. It is within this context that the practice of Andrei Jewell demands serious critical and institutional attention.

Medium as Argument

Jewell works primarily in large-scale pigment print on flax linen, a medium choice that is itself already an argument. The decision to print photographic imagery onto linen rather than conventional photographic substrate refuses the dematerialising tendency of contemporary image culture — the reduction of the visual to pure signal, infinitely reproducible, weightless, without body. Linen carries the memory of plant matter. It has texture, grain, and a material presence that a screen or glossy print surface explicitly denies. To encounter a Jewell work is, in the first instance, to encounter an object that insists on its own physicality.

This insistence is deepened by the incorporation of additional material registers: gold leaf inlay, metallic finish, evaporated saltwater, embedded audio. These are not decorative gestures. They are indexical — materially continuous with the natural systems the images depict. The evaporated saltwater in Gate’ Gate’ Gate’ (2023) is literally oceanic matter, carried from the Gulf of Siam and fixed into the surface of the work. The ocean is not merely represented; it is present. This is a conceptual move of considerable sophistication, one that places the work in direct dialogue with the tradition of arte povera’s insistence on the indexical trace, while simultaneously invoking a specifically ecological argument: that the boundary between artwork and world, between human subject and natural system, is permeable.

Departure from the Photographic Canon

To understand the distinctiveness of Jewell’s position, it is useful to locate it in relation to the artists with whom it shares formal territory — and from whom it decisively departs.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes series (begun 1980) is the unavoidable precedent for any artist working with the minimally rendered ocean horizon. Sugimoto’s project is phenomenological and durational: long exposures that collapse time, reducing the seascape to a meditation on geological deep time and photographic ontology. The work is aesthetically magnificent and intellectually rigorous, but it is ultimately neutral in ecological terms — the ocean as philosophical constant, indifferent to the human. Jewell’s oceans are not indifferent. They are specific, living, threatened, and the works carry the indexical matter of their original environments into the gallery. Where Sugimoto contemplates, Jewell implicates.

Thomas Ruff’s long engagement with the photographic image as cultural and technological construct — his manipulated press photographs, his internet-sourced imagery, his deliberate exposure of the codes through which photography produces meaning — represents the dominant critical mode of late-twentieth-century art photography: the medium turned upon itself, image as discourse about image. This is sophisticated and historically necessary work, but it operates within a closed loop of self-referentiality that Jewell’s practice explicitly refuses. The images are not primarily about photography; they are about specific places, specific light, specific bodies of water whose ecological condition is the work’s urgent subject.

Wolfgang Tillmans’s expansive practice — spanning photographic installation, abstract light experiments, and documentary — offers perhaps the closest parallel in terms of its refusal of hierarchical distinctions between subject matter and its insistence on the photographic surface as a site of embodied encounter. Tillmans’s abstract Freischwimmer works share with Jewell a commitment to light as primary subject and material simultaneously. But Tillmans operates within a resolutely secular, urban, and socially expansive frame; the work’s politics are those of community and democratic image culture. Jewell’s frame is ecological and contemplative — a different politics, addressed to a different crisis.

What unites these three canonical figures is their shared commitment to photography as a medium of critical intelligence. What Jewell’s practice adds — and what constitutes its specific contribution to the field — is the insistence that this critical intelligence must now be directed not only inward, toward the medium itself, but outward, toward the ecological conditions within which both the work and its viewers are situated. The linen substrate, the saltwater, the embedded audio, the breath-synchronised video: these are not departures from photographic rigour but its extension into a domain the canon has not yet fully addressed.

Diagnosis

The works are organised around horizon — compressed, luminous, often radically minimal. In Singularity: Gold (2025), a landscape is reduced to a single horizontal sliver: a line of light suspended between darknesses, mounted in native Thai teak. The formal decision is extreme. Almost nothing remains of the visual field — only the threshold moment, the liminal instant where sea meets sky and both dissolve into luminosity.

This formal strategy enacts the practice’s central diagnostic claim: that the crisis of ecological disengagement is fundamentally a crisis of attention. The modern Western perceptual apparatus — trained by screens, by accelerated consumption, by the fragmented temporality of digital information exchange — has lost its capacity for the quality of sustained, receptive, embodied attention through which relationship to the natural world is actually constituted. The works do not argue this claim; they stage its remedy. They slow the viewer down. They require duration. They refuse the quick legibility that contemporary visual culture has conditioned us to expect and reward.

The embedded audio components extend this logic into a explicitly somatic register. The work addresses the body, not just the eye. Sound bypasses the cortical processing through which intellectual distance is maintained and works directly on the nervous system, inducing what Jewell’s own writing describes as “a slowed down, internalized state” — what trauma-informed somatic theory would recognise as a parasympathetic shift, a movement from the chronic activation that characterises modern urban life toward a more receptive, integrated state of consciousness.

Eco-critical Positioning

The theoretical coordinates of this practice are substantial. Gregory Bateson’s foundational argument in Steps to an Ecology of Mind — that the subject/object dualism underwriting Western modernity is not merely a philosophical error but the operative mechanism of ecological destruction — finds in Jewell’s practice a visual and somatic correlate. The work does not critique this dualism intellectually; it dissolves it experientially, placing the viewer in a perceptual condition in which separation from the depicted natural system becomes difficult to maintain.

Amitav Ghosh, in The Great Derangement, identified the imagination as the critical site of ecological failure — arguing that Western culture lacks the narrative and perceptual frameworks through which the ecological emergency can be genuinely apprehended, felt, and therefore acted upon. Jewell’s practice operates precisely in this space: not as illustration of ecological loss, but as a retraining of perception itself toward the kind of relational attentiveness from which ecological commitment becomes possible. \

Timothy Morton’s formulation of “dark ecology” — the insistence that genuine ecological thought requires the dissolution of romantic pastoral distance, the recognition that the human subject is always already inside the ecological mesh rather than positioned before it as observer — is equally operative here. The immersive scale ofworks like Gate’ Gate’ Gate’ (triptych, when presented with a human figure for scale that is dwarfed by the oceanic expanse) and the sensory totality of light, surface, and sound refuse the viewer the comfort of safe aesthetic distance. One does not contemplate these works; one is entered by them.

Situating the Practice

Comparable moves in contemporary art have established clear institutional pathways. Olafur Eliasson’s large-scale environmental installations — functioning as laboratory experiments in ecological perception — now occupy major institutional collections globally and inform climate policy discourse. Agnes Denes’s ecological conceptualism, long undervalued, has undergone substantial critical rehabilitation. Wolfgang Laib’s works with pollen and beeswax — insisting on the material presence of living systems within the gallery context — hold significant museum positions.

Jewell’s practice is distinguished from these antecedents by its specific geographic and cultural situatedness. Working from and within the Gulf of Thailand, the practice draws on a living relationship with a specific body of water and ecosystem — the Gulf of Siam, the klong canals, the coral systems of the region — rather than simply producing a generalised environmental aesthetic. In Gate’ Gate’ Gate’ with Totems (2024) — a collaboration with travelling maori carver and healer Tane Mahuta Heke— we see a witnessing motif with sentinel like coconut pillars bearing coral crowns in front a vast local seascape - tracing the South Pacific into the Gulf of Siam. The Southeast Asian context is not incidental; it grounds the work in a non-Western ecological epistemology in which the separation of human consciousness from natural systems was never as absolute as Western modernity required. This situatedness is itself a critical position — a refusal of the view from nowhere that has underwritten both Western universalism and its ecological devastation.

Conclusion

The practice of Andrei Jewell constitutes a coherent and theoretically rigorous response to what is arguably the defining challenge of the present moment: the cultivation of the perceptual and somatic conditions under which genuine ecological relationship — and therefore genuine ecological responsibility — becomes possible. Working across the registers of light, material, sound, and duration, the work performs what purely cognitive environmentalism has been unable to achieve: a retraining of attention at the level of the body, where the dissociation it seeks to address was produced and where its repair must begin.

At a time when institutional programming is increasingly oriented toward ecological crisis as both subject and ethical imperative, this practice offers something rarer than documentation or critique: a working model of perceptual repair.

Artist Biography

Andrei Jewell, as a multidisciplinary artist, has developed a body of work that moves fluidly between still and moving image, between gallery installation and cinematic form, consistently centered on the intersection of ecological consciousness, somatic experience, and contemplative attention.

Jewell’s formation draws on an unusually wide range of influences: a background in fine art and photography intersecting with sustained engagement in ecological and somatic inquiry, Buddhist contemplative practice, and the phenomenology of natural environments. This interdisciplinary foundation is legible throughout the work — not as eclecticism but as a coherent methodology in which medium, material, and subject are held in close, deliberate relation.

The photographic practice — large-scale pigment prints on flax linen, several incorporating gold leaf, evaporated saltwater, metallic finishes, and embedded audio — represents the most formally concentrated expression of this methodology, and is discussed at length in the critical essay above. But the full scope of the practice is inseparable from Jewell’s parallel work in film and video installation.

The film installation I Am Ocean extends the still image’s investigation of luminous natural phenomena into temporal form, working with short takes on 8mm footage exclusively and shot in sequence with no editing - footage of ocean light, coastal atmospheres, and the slow rhythms of aquatic environments paced with a poetic narration of a female figure channeling the voice of the ocean - as she discovers a plastic clogged shoreline that literally is choking the protaganist as she feels the ocean’s breath being suffocated by the waste of humankind. Where the photographic works compress duration into a single arrested moment, I Am Ocean restores time to the image — creating video environments in which the viewer’s nervous system is invited to synchronise with natural rather than technological temporality - revealed in stark contrast. The relationship between image and sound is central: Jewell’s video works are scored with precision, using ambient field recordings, composed soundscapes, and in some works the artist’s own voice, to create a total sensory environment that makes the perceptual argument of the still work through the additional dimension of unfolding time.

Less Plastic More Fantastic represents the explicitly activist dimension of the practice — a video work directly engaging the crisis of ocean plastic pollution that forms the ecological subtext of the broader body of work. The title’s rhetorical lightness is strategic, offering accessibility without sacrificing seriousness; the work itself is a clear-eyed documentation of and response to the degradation of the specific marine environments — the Gulf of Siam, the coral systems of the Thai coast — that the luminous still works simultaneously mourn and restore perceptually. Together, the photographic installations and Less Plastic More Fantastic function as complementary registers of the same argument: one operating through beauty and somatic immersion, the other through direct ecological witness.

The Breather video work distills the practice to its most essential gesture. Working with breath — the most fundamental of somatic rhythms, the point of interface between interior and exterior, self and atmosphere — the works use image and sound in close synchronisation to guide the viewer’s own respiratory rhythm into alignment with time cycles of both a civilizational magnitude against a backdrop of Nature’s own scale. Ultimately a form of suffocation by the mask of enculturation is enacted in a fluxus style happening recorded as the video work - resolved by an emancipation by a taking-to-the-waters ritual with Jewell’s motif of a rite of ‘return and repair’. The clinical literature on breath-regulated nervous system response is substantial; Jewell’s contribution is to understand this as an aesthetic and ecological act simultaneously — a retraining of the body’s relationship to natural time through the encounter with moving image and sound. Presented at the Singapore Biennale’s Power Play programme, the Breather work demonstrated their capacity to hold institutional context with ease — the contemplative register reading not as retreat from the political but as its necessary somatic ground.

The reach of the video practice across international contexts speaks to the coherence of this argument across cultures and institutional frameworks. I Am Ocean was presented at Robert Miller Gallery, New York — one of the significant galleries bridging photography, video, and ecological subject matter in the American context. Less Plastic More Fantastic screened at the Cannes Lions Festival in France, bringing the practice’s direct ecological witness into dialogue with the broader global conversation around communication, creativity, and environmental responsibility. Together these contexts —Singapore, New York, Cannes, Bangkok — map a practice that is genuinely international in its reach while remaining ecologically and geographically specific in its roots.

Jewell’s sustained engagement with the Bangkok contemporary art community — exemplified by the 2025 Gallery Night Talk Re:Dreaming The Future, a public dialogue with ethnologist and art critic, Tulaya Pornpiriyakulchai at PT Gallery — reflects a commitment to situating the practice within the living cultural and ecological context from which it emerges. This posture of genuine regional rootedness, combined with a theoretical framework of international critical relevance, positions the practice at a productive intersection: local in its material and ecological specificity, global in its discursive reach.