About

/BIO/

I am a UK based artist. My practice stems from a fine art background employing performance and more recently writing and biotechnical practices with which to consider the body as material and site in which narrative threads of the personal, sexual, social and political knot and unknot in shifting permutations.

Since graduating from the University of Wales Institute Cardiff in 1998 with a BA(HONS) in Fine Art, my work has been exhibited widely throughout the UK and Europe. I have been invited to Australia and more recently Beijing where I performed at the 2006 DaDao festival. In 2007 I made newly commissioned work for SPILL, Festival of performance, London. I have also presented my work widely speaking at conferences and symposia including BioDifference conference Biennial of Electronic Art, Perth 2004. I have worked as a lecturer in the UK and Australia in fine art, drama and dance departments.

In October 2004 I completed an honorary research fellowship as artist in residence at SymbioticA, the art science collaborative research lab, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, funded by a Wellcome Trust sciart research and development award. I was concerned with exploring convergence between contemporary biotechnical tissue culturing and traditional lace making crafts, using the materiality of skin at its cellular level as material and metaphor. My research in this area continues as does developing performative investigations of some of the tendrils and tangents that arose during this period of research. I have expanded this research whilst an Honorary Research associate in an Arts Council of England funded residency in the School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, June to December 2007 investigating spider silk and muscle cell cultures as biomedia. I am currently fundraising to continue this research.

/STATEMENT/

My practice stems from a fine art background employing performance, writing and biomedia with which to consider the body as a site in which narrative threads of the personal, sexual, social and political knot and unknot in shifting permutations. The materiality or fabric of the body, as well as its specificity, is also important. The relationships between bodily interior/exterior spaces are explored as a continuum. The permeable boundaries of the skin membrane defy it as an impenetrable container of a coherent or fixed ‘self’.

Re-negotiating the relationship to audience, and recognising it as a dynamic exchange where meaning is constructed, has been central to generating works. This distance has gradually closed bringing artist and audience into immediate and intimate dialogue, allowing the possibility to make interventions that are sometimes tender, other times troubling, always revealing.

Last year I began to make ‘dances’, with my 41 year old non-dance trained body, attempting to totter at the edge of some kind of capacity and some unnamed ground, resulting in a new movement based work Untitled (Syncope) commissioned for the aforementioned SPILL Festival of performance. This year I have been investigating similar performance strategies towards performance and film outcomes.

/CV/

available here:Kira CV