Joel Sherwood Spring

Joel Sherwood Spring was born in 1992 on Gadigal Country in Warrang/Sydney, New South Wales, and he continues to live and work there today. A Wiradjuri artist and thinker, his practice interrogates how land, infrastructure, and digital systems shape the lived experience of Country.

Sherwood Spring plays with the dual meaning of “seeding” and “ceding.” The work references cloud seeding—the release of substances such as silver iodide from aircraft to induce rain—through a white aluminium sculpture modelled on an aircraft flare rack. He contrasts this with the concept of cloud storage, where the vast physical footprint of remote data centres is concealed behind the metaphor of “the cloud.”

The work shows how historic appropriations of First Nations land for farming, mining, and suburban expansion—symbolised by the surveyor’s chain and suburban fence—are now mirrored by the enormous land requirements of digital infrastructure, from social media servers to defence systems like Pine Gap, referenced in the adjacent wall painting. Through this lens, Sherwood Spring interrogates what is being ceded in the digital age, and how contemporary forms of extraction continue to reshape Country.