Pressure Systems, 2026
Video and sound installation with Jana Irmert
PUNQ Festival Townsville
Pressure Systems is an immersive moving-image and sound installation by Yandell Walton and Jana Irmert, redeveloped for an unused transport depot in Townsville. The work explores the intense relationship between landscape and the extractive industry of coal mining.
Using a 3D scan of a sandstone formation from the Blue Mountains region, Yandell Walton transforms the rock into an uncanny digital presence suspended between visibility and erasure. The work reflects on the hidden forces that act beneath the surface: geological pressure, industrial extraction, and the slow transformation of living matter into fossil fuel.
Drawing on the experience of the mine’s acoustic environment, Jana Irmert creates a soundtrack using rare analogue synthesisers. Echoing the rhythms of drilling and excavation, the composition evokes both the machinery of extraction and the deep-time memory of the ancient ecosystems compressed within the coal itself.
Recorded Data of total extracted coal over the four mine sites in the area produces particle emmissions. The data set from Soringvale triggers the rock formations to vibrate and is connected to the geophone low frequensy sounds in the composition.
