‘Instead of a garden, our inheritance is a longing,’ intones artist Sarah Wood in the voiceover to her film-essay Project Paradise. The 20-minute video work, projected onto a circle of sand on the floor of Fruitmarket’s warehouse annex, combines documentary footage with lyrical perambulations to offer a layered origin narrative for the ecological and human catastrophes of the present, shuffling between human-centred and geological timescales.

Wood’s film also touches on the colonial dimensions of ecological exploitation (‘all paradises are defined by the people who are not allowed to enter’) and it appears at a time of heightened sensitivity for cultural institutions across Scotland, with Fruitmarket amongst a number of organisations backed by investment fund Baillie Gifford, which is currently being urged to cut ties with firms linked to illegal settlements in Palestine. That contextual irony aside, the work is arranged into seven sections as per the Christian creation myth, a story of life on earth from prehistory to the Anthropocene is interwoven with stories of Joseph Beuys’ wartime experiences as a fighter pilot. During that time, he bore witness to ecological catastrophes that fundamentally informed his later practice.

Beuys’ and Richard Demarco’s Black And White Oil Conference, held in 1974 at a time when exploitation of Scotland’s offshore oil reserves was just beginning, forms a thematic fulcrum of sorts, seemingly interpreted as both model and missed opportunity. Like Beuys’ conference half a century ago, Wood’s artwork implies that we are at a moment of enmeshed crisis and opportunity, when decisions can be made that will help rescue the Earth from its current state of sickness. After Covid-19, her narrative suggests, ‘we now know that the world can change overnight’. A stirring and poetic work.

Sarah Wood: Project Paradise, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, until Sunday 21 January.