Kelly Richardson — whose large-scale, digitally constructed video landscapes have made her one of the most distinctive artists working in moving image — opened a new exhibition this summer. Her works are immersive, wall-filling video environments: hyper-detailed natural scenes, painstakingly composited from filmed footage and computer-generated elements, in which something is quietly, insistently wrong — a forest lit by an unnatural glow, a sky altered, a landscape bearing the traces of some future catastrophe. Using the toolkit of visual effects not for blockbuster spectacle but for eerie, contemplative realism, she pictures the speculative, climate-haunted futures we are actively building toward.
VFX as a fine-art medium
Richardson’s practice is a case study in taking industrial image-making tools — compositing, CGI, the grammar of cinematic effects — and turning them toward slow, immersive, and unsettling ends. Where a film uses these techniques to convince you of a spectacle for two hours, she uses them to hold you in a single, near-still landscape long enough for the unease to seep in. The realism is the point: because the scenes look plausible, their subtle wrongness lands as genuine dread rather than fantasy. It’s a distinct lane among this site’s digital artists — not generative code, not AI, but the cinematic-digital sublime deployed as environmental warning.
Landscapes of the Anthropocene
The throughline of Richardson’s work is the future of the natural world under human influence — landscapes that are beautiful and damaged at once, familiar and irrevocably changed. By rendering these futures with such convincing detail and scale, she makes abstract anxieties about climate and technology into something a viewer stands inside and feels bodily. It’s speculative art in the truest sense: not predicting, but making a possible future vivid enough to reckon with, which is exactly the kind of work this site’s digital-artist coverage exists to surface.