The Rig, 2023, 5:37 minutes, 4K CGI video (web version 1080p), courtesy the artist

The Rig is a site-specific video work created during a residency with Shetland Arts, part of a British Council exchange on extraction economies. Reconstructed from an oil rig decommissioning site where a massive jacket lay exposed alongside hundreds of thousands of pounds of dead marine life, the work reimagines this industrial ruin as a haunted ecology. Through an unconventional use of photogrammetry, the rig is not simply documented but resurrected—transformed into a speculative sanctuary and public artwork that shelters the life it once destroyed. This gesture draws on notions of hauntology and ruin ecology, revealing how infrastructures of extraction persist as spectral presences in both landscape and memory. By redirecting a tool of capture toward acts of care, The Rig imagines a post-extractive future in which remnants of industry become architectures of repair, asking how digital technologies might help us reckon with what extraction leaves behind and reconfigure our relationships to the more-than-human world.

The work was presented in a solo exhibition at Shetland Arts in Lerwick, Scotland. To hear more about the residency and research behind the project, listen to an interview on the Coastal Knowledge Podcast hosted by Chris Bonfiglioli of the Young Academy of Scotland.

More information can be found at X-CHANGE: Artist Residency & Exchange through Shetland Arts.