Molly Palmer

Lives and works in Amsterdam and London

Artist statement

My practice gives attention to perspectives and identities that exist outside dominant reality systems, and explores their potential to generate new ones. I investigate shifts in perception that restructure our relationship to the world, through participatory experiments, collaborations, archival and material research. I work in a range of modes and media, connecting personal experiences with histories, mythologies and esoteric methodologies that offer pragmatic technologies of becoming. The resulting forms and narratives are applied to metabolise complex, often absurd and alienating dimensions of living with non-physical disability. I work within and between filmmaking, installation, sculpture, and choreography. My handmade props, sets and costumes transport participants into layered worlds where music, gesture and dialogue explore the strangeness hidden within ordinary things. This practice is episodic and accumulative, recognising the continuum of cyclical connections between past, present and future. By generating spaces that are visibly handmade, I build hybrid cultures dislocated from the slick virtual worlds we inhabit daily; a place with its own rhythm and logic, where reality and fiction are destabilised and intertwined. My aesthetic approach is influenced by the function of visual culture in social justice movements. Its imagery, clothing and objects are strategies for unity, dignity and perseverance under oppression. References to sci-fi, occulture and utopian...

Artwork