ARTIST BIO
Kat Lalor is a Queer Visual Artist, generating performative and lens-based work. Their practice adapts speculative fiction, temporal theories and drag as core methodologies, utilised to explore Queer intelligibility.
Lalor considers drag as a binding agent in their practice, allowing the body to become a critical conductor. A Queer experience of the body can often feel limited or uncomfortable; drag enacts a political and historical methodology for expanding the body, molding its intelligibility, and performing purposeful embodiments.
Drawing from subjective experiences of othering, both internally and externally, Lalor’s work explores key moments of tension, choice and slippage; each embedded in a Queer experience of navigating the world and shaping identity simultaneously.
Lalor graduated with an MA in Fine Art from TU Dublin in 2024. They were the recipient of the Fire Station Artists Studios Digital Media Graduate Award (2022), and an Arts Council Agility Award (2022). Their work has been exhibited in the RDS Visual Arts Award (2022), The RHA Annual (2023), The Complex Gallery (2024) and The Highlanes Gallery (2024).
WOWTE RESIDENCY
During their time in this residency, Kat is interested in exploring the entangled topics of Queer Futurity and Vampiric Metaphor. Many dominant Vampiric narratives feel relevant to the concerns of We Only Want the Earth, as Vampires have long served as metaphor for capitalist modes of production and extrapolation, and as questions of accessing futurity become more and more prominent in our daily lives. The subversion of these dominant metaphors through Queer intervention allows for an exploration of political and ecological questions of futurity.
Led by methodologies of Drag and performance, Kat aims to dive deeper into this research, focusing on a Queering of the Vampiric towards an approach to futurity which is shared and non-extrapolative. This research is informed by a combination of theoretical and fictional texts, including; Alexis Lothian’s ‘Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility, Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Fledgling’, and ‘Carmilla’ by Sheridan Le Fanu.
SELECTED WORKS
Alone in the Heart of an Alien World
2024
Performative Film, 25 mins
Exhibited:
WAYSTATION, Group Exhibition, The Complex Gallery, 2024
A lone alien ranger, ‘The Unitary Now’, embarks on a trans-temporal journey in search of answers regarding its othering on earth. Led by a pink omnipotent time guide, The Unitary Now surveys alternate planets of the past; the temporal cycles of dysphoria and binary knowledge which have contributed to The Unitary Now’s isolation.Â
Using Drag as an acknowledged fiction and performative tool, ‘Alone in the Heart of an Alien World’ references cinematic archetypes as points of recognition, layered amongst Queer and subjective experience. The re-performance of a subjective experience of othering through a fictional lens allows for outcomes and pathways to be re-written and alternatively experienced; creating a breaking point in dominant, repeated narratives of othering and reclaiming agency.