Kat Stanley

Folklore is the art of the people. A manifestation of our instinctual fears and hopes into an entity separate from ourselves. My practice is built on the back of such stories, passed down generations through the act of oral storytelling never intended to be written down. Dyslexia means I find the written word to be inaccessible, yet within folklore, I experience the weightlessness of intellectual freedom. Uncaged by the constraints of words, the possibilities of my creative enlightenment bloom. I materialise an imaginary world into reality using video art, evolving modern-day lore.

This year I have fallen into a rabbit hole of world-building practices. Using last year's work as a contextual foundation, I used cuckoos to highlight hidden forms of parasitism in everyday life. No matter the form it takes, whether it be technology or an oppressive government force, there is a parasite in everyone's life that feeds upon them. Alienation through the bizarre leads the viewer to realise this fact and change it. Merging methods of alienation and world-building acts as an effective means to educate in the same way folklore and parables were intended to do. Their influence is not obvious, it is tightly wrapped in metaphor to not spoon feed an audience but instead create a path for them to follow themselves to find the information at the end.

I use recognisable avian species to ground the work, meaning even when audiences eventually step out of my world and back into reality, the sight of these birds is forever recontextualised. The imagery of my painting and moving image work will thus burrow into the consciousness of the audience, laying eggs in their minds. Like any egg, they will eventually hatch, causing a new view of the world now unclouded by mortal convention.