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 iving ground — the question of what art can do becomes urgent and specific. Representation of the crisis has proven insufficient on its own. Andrei Jewell’s practice is one attempt to work at the level where the crisis originates: in the perceptual and somatic dissociation of the modern subject from the natural world. Whether that attempt succeeds, and where it runs into difficulty, is worth examining as closely as the ambition behind it.

Medium as Argument

Jewell works primarily in large-scale pigment print on flax linen, a medium choice that carries its own argument. Printing photographic imagery onto linen rather than conventional photographic substrate resists the dematerialising tendency of contemporary image culture — the reduction of the visual to pure signal, weightless and infinitely reproducible. Linen has grain, texture, a material presence a screen denies. To encounter a Jewell work is, in the first instance, to encounter an object insisting on its own physicality. This is deepened by additional material registers: gold leaf, metallic finish, evaporated seawater, embedded audio. The evaporated saltwater in Gate’ Gate’ Gate’ (2023) is literally oceanic matter, carried from the Gulf of Siam and fixed into the work’s surface —not a representation of the ocean but a fragment of it. The gesture places the work in dialogue with arte povera’s insistence on the indexical trace, and with a specifically ecological claim: that the boundary between artwork and world is permeable. The risk in this strategy is real and worth naming. Indexical material of this kind — actual seawater, actual coral dust — can tip easily into gesture for its own sake, a kind of materialist sentimentality that asks the viewer to be moved by provenance rather than by the work’s formal intelligence. Not every piece in the body of work resolves this tension equally well; the strongest pieces earn the material inclusion through the rigor of the image itself, while in weaker moments the material risks functioning as a substitute for that rigor rather than an extension of it.

Departure from the Photographic Canon

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes (begun 1980) is the unavoidable precedent for any artist working the minimally rendered ocean horizon. Sugimoto’s project is phenomenological and durational: long exposures collapsing time into a meditation on geological deep time and photographic ontology, the ocean held as philosophical constant, indifferent to the human. Jewell’s oceans are not indifferent — they are specific, threatened, and materially continuous with their originating environments. Where Sugimoto contemplates, Jewell implicates. But this comparison cuts both ways: Sugimoto’s coolness is also a discipline, a refusal to tell the viewer how to feel. Jewell’s warmer, more materially insistent approach trades some of that discipline for immediacy, and a viewer less sympathetic to the ecological framing may experience the insistence as didactic rather than immersive.

Thomas Ruff’s engagement with the photographic image as cultural and technological construct — manipulated press photographs, internet-sourced imagery, deliberate exposure of photography’s meaning-making codes — represents a dominant critical mode in late-twentieth-century art photography: the medium turned on itself. Jewell’s images are not primarily about photography as a system; they are about specific places and their ecological condition. This is a different project, not a superior one — Ruff’s self-referentiality is doing serious critical work that Jewell’s practice, by its own choice of subject, largely sets aside.

Wolfgang Tillmans’s practice — spanning installation, abstract light work, documentary— shares with Jewell a refusal of hierarchy between subject and surface, and a commitment to light as material. But Tillmans operates within a secular, urban, socially expansive frame; Jewell’s is ecological and contemplative. The comparison is useful less as a hierarchy than as a way of locating Jewell’s specific address, which is narrower than Tillmans’s in subject but not obviously more urgent for being narrower.

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 of light suspended between darknesses, mounted in native Thai teak. Almost nothing remains of the visual field but the threshold moment itself. This formal strategy stages a diagnostic claim: that ecological disengagement is, in part, a crisis of attention — that a perceptual apparatus trained by screens and fragmented digital temporality has lost the capacity for sustained, receptive attention through which relationship to the natural world is constituted. It’s a claim with real Intellectual pedigree, but it is also one the art world has made often enough that it risks being received as familiar rather than as argument. What distinguishes Jewell’s version from a generic slow-art position is the specificity of the ecological referent — the Gulf of Siam, the klong systems, a named and particular body of water — rather than horizon- as-such. The embedded audio extends this into a somatic register, addressing the body rather than only the eye. Jewell’s own writing describes the intended effect as “a slowed down, internalized state,” which trauma-informed somatic theory would recognise as a parasympathetic shift. This is a plausible physiological account, though it is also one that is difficult to verify from the work itself and easy to assert rhetorically; the strength of the claim depends on the audio’s craft in a given piece rather than on the theory backing it.

Eco-critical Positioning

Gregory Bateson’s argument in Steps to an Ecology of Mind — that the subject/object dualism underwriting Western modernity is the operative mechanism of ecological destruction — finds a visual and somatic correlate here, though correlate is the right word rather than proof: the work stages a dissolution of separation experientially, but staging is not the same as achieving it, and how durably that effect survives outside the gallery is an open question the work doesn’t answer. Amitav Ghosh’s argument in The Great Derangement — that Western culture lacks the narrative frameworks through which ecological emergency can be apprehended — gives Jewell’s practice a plausible frame: not illustration of loss, but retraining of perception. Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology,” which insists on dissolving romantic pastoral distance so the human subject recognises itself as inside the ecological mesh, is similarly operative in the immersive scale of works like Gate’ Gate’ Gate’. These are strong theoretical anchors, but they are also frequently invoked in contemporary eco-art criticism, and the work’s success depends less on citing them correctly than on whether a given piece actually resists “safe aesthetic distance” for a specific viewer in a specific room — which varies, and which no framework guarantees.

Situating the Practice

Olafur Eliasson’s environmental installations, Agnes Denes’s ecological conceptualism, Wolfgang Laib’s work with pollen and beeswax — these establish that material-ecological practice can hold major institutional ground. Jewell’s practice differs from these in its specific geographic rootedness: working from and within the Gulf of Thailand, drawing on a lived relationship to the Gulf of Siam, the klong canals, the coral systems of the region, rather than a generalised environmental aesthetic. In Gate’ Gate’ Gate’ with Totems (2024), a collaboration with Māori carver Tane Mahuta Heke, coconut pillars bearing coral crowns stand as sentinels before a local seascape, tracing a line from the South Pacific into the Gulf of Siam. This situatedness is a genuine strength, and also a genuine constraint. A practice this specifically rooted in one place and one set of traditions (Ngoma ceremony, Māori cosmology, Himalayan Buddhist training, Advaita Vedanta, Gulf of Siam ecology) runs the risk that a wide range of source traditions can read, to a skeptical viewer, as spiritual eclecticism rather than integration — borrowed authority rather than earned synthesis. The work doesn’t fully resolve this risk; it asks the viewer’s trust that these are lived engagements rather than curated references, and that trust is doing real work in how the practice is received. However reference to anthropologist Alfred Gel’s observation, that of Art as a technology of enchantment, with the repeated use of site specific material often layered into the visual works draws extensively on similar practices by all of these cultural influences, loosely tying Jewell’s work in with his extensive documentary work and his lived experience, sometimes for years, in amongst the cultures that he is influenced by and is in active dialogue with through his practice.

Conclusion

Jewell’s practice is a considered response to a real and difficult problem: how to move ecological consciousness from the cognitive register into the somatic one, where the dissociation was produced. Working across light, material, sound, and duration, the work attempts what purely cognitive environmentalism has struggled to achieve. It does not always succeed evenly across the body of work, and the theoretical framework it draws on — Bateson, Ghosh, Morton — is powerful but also common currency in contemporary eco-art discourse, which means the work’s distinction has to be earned in the specificity of execution rather than assumed from the citations themselves. At its strongest, when material, image, and place are held in genuinely close relation, it offers something more interesting than documentation: a working, imperfect model of perceptual repair.

Artist Biography

Andrei Jewell is a multidisciplinary artist whose work moves between still and moving image, gallery installation and cinematic form, centered on ecological consciousness, somatic experience, and contemplative attention. Jewell’s formation draws on a wide range of influences: training in fine art and photography, sustained engagement with ecological and somatic inquiry, Buddhist contemplative practice, and the phenomenology of natural environments. This range is legible throughout the work as a consistent methodology rather than eclecticism, though — as noted above — it is also a methodology that asks something of the viewer’s trust. The photographic practice — large-scale pigment prints on flax linen incorporating gold leaf, evaporated saltwater, metallic finishes, and embedded audio — is the most formally concentrated expression of this approach, and is discussed at length above. The practice extends into film and video installation. I Am Ocean extends the still image’s investigation of luminous natural phenomena into temporal form, working exclusively with short takes on 8mm footage, shot in sequence without editing — ocean light, coastal atmospheres, the slow rhythms of aquatic environments — paced against a narration in which a female figure channels the ocean’s voice, discovering a plastic-choked shoreline that suffocates her. Where the photographic works arrest a single moment, I Am Ocean restores duration, inviting the viewer’s nervous system toward natural rather than technological temporality. The sound design — ambient field recordings, composed soundscapes, at times Jewell’s own voice — is central to the effect. Less Plastic More Fantastic is the more directly activist register of the practice, engaging ocean plastic pollution in the Gulf of Siam and the Thai coral systems. Its title trades some seriousness for accessibility — a calculated risk that works better as outreach than as gallery object, and the two registers (the luminous still work, the plainer activist video) sit somewhat differently within the overall practice as a result. The Breather distills the practice to its most essential gesture: using breath — the interface between interior and exterior, self and atmosphere — image and sound work to guide the viewer’s respiratory rhythm against timescales of both civilizational and natural magnitude. The work stages a suffocation by the “mask of enculturation” in a fluxus-style happening, resolved through a return-to-water ritual. The clinical literature on breath-regulated nervous system response is substantial; the work’s contribution is to treat this as an aesthetic and ecological act rather than a therapeutic one — a framing that is more persuasive in the room, with the sound design at full effect, than it is described secondhand. The Breather was presented at the Singapore Biennale’s Power Play programme. The video work’s international reach — I Am Ocean at Robert Miller Gallery, New York; Less Plastic More Fantastic screened at the Cannes Lions Festival; The Breather at Singapore — sits alongside Jewell’s continued engagement with the Bangkok contemporary art community, including the 2025 Gallery Night Talk Re:Dreaming The Future, a public dialogue with ethnologist and art critic Tulaya Pornpiriyakulchai at PT Gallery. The practice is locally specific in its material and ecological grounding while carrying international discursive reach .