Interconnected stories examine situations involving the five senses. Touch is represented by a massage therapist who is treating a woman, while her daughter accidentally loses the woman's pre-school daughter in the park. The older daughter meets a voyeur (vision), a professional house-cleaner has an acute sense of smell, a cake maker has lost her sense of taste, and an older man is losing his hearing.

Tombs weaves together the triangular story points of three Oklahoma sisters and their mother who travel to Los Angeles as a part of a relocation program in the 1950s that gave Native Americans the opportunity to become “civilized” by getting jobs in urban centres. When they arrive, they begin to understand that like many east-to-west dreams, the reality is not the new beginning they sought. Abandoned by government policy and in acute poverty, they begin to search for their own, finding home in “the tombs” – the cemented riverways of LA. It is here a young mother is killed, and the lives of her children separate down three very different paths that emerge in 1970s Los Angeles – weaving together one telling, one flood.

Bombarded by thousands of images every day, are we still able to truly see them, especially those of conflict and its aftermath? Helen Doyle takes us on a quest for the meaning of images and discovers a vast palette of contrasting images which shock and compel.