Underground

Kat Lalor is a Queer visual artist, generating a practice of worldbuilding through moving-image, performance and writing. They invoke their practice to interrogate constructed binary categories which limit the possibilities of Queer intelligibility.

As someone existing between the gender binary, Kat’s practice acts as an explorative space for self-experimentation, perspective-switching, and speculative narrative building. They enact this by adapting Drag as a core methodology. Inspired by the writing of Renate Lorenz, Drag becomes a historical and political tool for symbiotic knowledge-making and knowledge-dismantling. With the performing body as the active site, Drag enables purposeful embodiments which can collapse the boundaries of truth/fiction, subjective/collective, and self/other.

Enthralled by the writings of Queer academics who seek to dismantle socio-political constructs of gender, time and space, Kat combines the theoretical and the personal through pre-existing speculative fictions. This creates a point of recognisable access, and emphasises the acts of subversion, destabilisation, and reclamation at play. Utilising absurd, camp and DIY aesthetics, normative knowledge is destabilised and binary barriers can be broken. Through this, they create a space to question the validity of all normative and political ‘truths’, including those used to deny marginalised groups bodily autonomy and self-determination. Combined, these tools allow for critical reflections, re-imaginings, and reclaimings of Queer experience.

Kat completed their BA in Fine Art in 2022 and an MA in Fine Art in 2024. Their work has been included in shows at The Complex Gallery, The Highlanes Gallery, the RHA Gallery, and Droichead Arts Centre. They are a recipient of the We Only Want the Earth Residency Awards 2024-2025.