Katy B Plummer The Sea and the Shape (2020) digital video and dyed linen, dyed wool, dyed jute, pearls and fibrefill.
Katy B Plummer makes complicated, messy video installations, each project packed with personal biography, scraps of history, recycled narratives, magical incantations, cinematic storytelling, anachronistic textile practices and high-school theatre aesthetics. She thinks about about the phenomenology of radical politics and the politics of spirituality, and about whiteness as a haunted house. At its root, her practice suggests that complicity won’t protect us, and that violence and witchcraft are legitimate political strategies.
THE SEA AND THE SHAPE digs into ancestral whiteness, unravelling the spiritual and political implications of my (North American) settler colonist heritage. It aims to unearth and air out the ravenous spiritual vacuum at whiteness' heart.
The Witch in this project is a conglomeration of inherited material. Her body is heavily mediated. She is a psychically and politically charged embodiment of intergenerational trauma received and inflicted.