Kirk Palmer's trilogy of films, Murmur, Hiroshima and Sentinel, examines the ancient belief, landscape and the post-war history of Japan. Murmur (2006) is an evocation in filmic language of Shinto or animistic belief. It presents a forest of bamboo trees in the hills around Kyoto: the trees, swaying in the wind, seem to have acquired a kind of collective personality and collective moods. Hiroshima (2007) is constructed from static shots of the city today, originally shot on 16mm film. The film was made entirely within the A-bomb blast-zone; many of the sites filmed by Palmer are referenced in John Hersey's classic 1946 text Hiroshima. The film addresses, in Palmer's words, the way in which the blast of 1945 is "receding from view", not only in terms of the physical traces that remain but also in the consciousness of Hiroshima's inhabitants. The concerns of Murmur and Hiroshima come together in the third film, Sentinel (2011), currently a work in progress, which explores the small mountainous island of Yakushima. It is a place of enormous biological diversity, a World Heritage Site and the home of cryptomeria trees that are thousands of years old. On August 9th 1945 the sky above Yakushima was the rendezvous for the B-29 bomber Bock's Car on a mission to drop the second atomic bomb on Japan. Complications meant that Bock's Car had to circle the island for forty minutes. This delay spared the city of Kokura, the primary target, and sealed the fate of Nagasaki.

Kirk Palmer graduated from the Royal Colege of Art, London, in 2006. He had his first solo show at Paradise Row, London, in 2007. His work was included recently in Natural Wonders: New Art from London, Baibakov Art Projects, Moscow; and Landscape as a Dream, Studio La Città, Verona.