kat macdonald’s work draws upon a complex tapestry of experiences with trauma, queerness, heartache, social structures, and gender, exploring what it means to exist in a life intertwined with various forms of loss. through performance, sound, visual, and written art, her work challenges audiences to contemplate their own relationship to art by breaking traditional presentational formats, allowing them a tactile sense of the work and its creation.
kat’s current work focuses on exploring the politics of art, both through its creation and its interaction with audiences, using an adaption on Augusto Boal’s Theatre Of The Oppressed framework. by challenging conventional dynamics between performer and audience, she aims to provoke agency and engagement, enabling the audience to fully realise and engage with a piece’s themes through a dialogical model of performance. through this approach, she hopes to create work that critiques current commercial trends of the artist-as-commodity, striving instead for revolutionary art centred on an understanding of the inevitability of sympoiesis (a term from social scholar Donna J. Haraway to describe the interaction of collective entities collaborating to create).
she believes in the urgent need to recentre the creative process to properly acknowledge how work is made in sympoiesis even without direct evolvement. highlighting how all work is made in collaboration with others from its inception, with the idea of ‘ownership’ being a capitalistic obfuscation of the reality of both life and artistic creation. while this focus could give way to a careless lack of citation and a rampant justicifcation for plagiarism (the arguement; ‘why cite anyone if anything could be cited’), the links and methods of tracing involvement and credit are crucial to dispelling the objectifying fallacy of the artist as a solo creator and practitioner.
culturally, we are familiar with work containing a political message, but what does it mean to create art politically? not just stating a political position or asking a politicised question, but to work within a political method or commitment? kat’s current research means to explore this through the re-development of leftist political methods of artistic collaboration and creation, re-exploring the act of ‘political art’ with a political purpose.
it’s worth acknowledging alongside this intention, the difficulties of approaching these methods within the current era of hypercapitalism. we live on the boundary of a mirror, where it is both easy and difficult to exist within community with others. on the one hand, it has never been easier to create a shared landscape of ideas and culture, with web platforms and tools making it easier than ever to engender a shared context, language and reference point, an in-group. however, due to the constrictions of societal expectations and ‘life paths’, it’s hard to find a shared dream with others that isn’t predetermined or established, wrapped in layers of culture norms, limitations and compromises on desire.
to borrow from the messaging of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, artists making socialist political work must no longer orate or preach, selling a product to their audience (or more accurately, their investors), but instead engage them within the dialogue of a work. join with the audience in the act of creation. to escape from predetermined desires is to engage others in the act of desiring. what do they wish from participation? how can their desires interact with the other audience members? what landscape may we create when unmoored from pre-packaged expectations of ‘art’ as a consumable? as artists, we must trust the audience to desire with us.
communities existing under severe oppression, have always been better at this. without the ability to exist within culturally propagated conceptualizations of a ‘proper’ or ‘successful’ participation in society, they’ve had to desire beyond those boundaries. re-thinking and reforging a world which can hold their personhood. as illustrated in Lola Olufemi’s Experiments In Imagining Otherwise, the world we wish to come into being can happen without a compromise on that desire, it just takes a collective rethinking of how and what we want from our world. as artists, it’s our role to engage in the act of unlocking that desire. we must "shatter the romance of what was"⚇ enabling people to wake up to the current of what is and the potential of what could be.
intimacy is a core component of this. by keeping ourselves distant from an audience, both physically and metaphysically, we obfuscate our humanity. this is the core of the artist-as-commodity, the artist has shed their humanity and instead emerged an object, a product ready to be bought, sold, advertised and ultimately shelved or mythologised once they no longer retain their value. this process hinders both the potential for art as a political medium and the artist themselves as fertile ground for creative potential. within the case of the artist, how many people exist beyond the shallow scope of corporate allocated success for long? how many artists benefit long term from the success? i’d hazard not a great amount. for us to break this cycle we must embrace the radical intimacy that exists within creative process itself, allowing audiences to see more of the humanity of the artists and in turn, seeing the humanity of the audience as not just consumers.
this is where i need to practice a little of what i preach. so far i’ve been talking in an authoritative third person. wrapping myself in an objectifying mystique of ‘kathleen’, ‘the artist’, even while you (the person reading this) is well aware its written by me, about the philosophy of my practice. its a funny compulsion. otherwise i’ve been using ‘we’ pronouns, again an authoritative and rather funny choice for a manifesto about the need for radical intimacy and love within the creative process. so with this newly stated intimacy, let me reapproach Pedagogy Of The Oppressed from a more personal lens, extending a hand into my own reading of the text. my favourite segments goes as follows:
"because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others. no matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause -- the cause of liberation"⚇
it’s true that much of my work has previously been drawn from the negatives of existing as a marginalised and trauma informed individual. many people making art default to this, likely due to art’s unique characteristic of expressing the deeper, thornier parts of ourselves, from a less direct angle. an alluring impulse to those looking for the solace of understanding while fearing the vulnerability of authentic intimacy. as Anne Carson exposits beautifully in her retelling of Stesichorus’ account of the Greek figure of Geryon "To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked."⚇. true intimacy is terrifying. but here we are faced with a choice. or maybe i’m faced with a choice. do i allow this history to consume me, entering a state of nihilistic entitlement towards the past which still, on some painful level, holds me? or do i let love be the guiding focus of my work? love be the focus of my political zeal and commitment to change, to “the cause of liberation”⚇. a far greater act of courage. pinning my work on the hope that things can be better, the desire for a world in which genocide, violence (using a framework that violence can only be enacted by an oppressor on the oppressed, otherwise it constitutes retaliation⚇), injustice and prejudice doesn’t just exist as an accepted fact of the human condition. to quote Colossians 3:14, do i "let love guide (my) life"⚇?
if, as Ursula K Le Guin puts it in Telling Is Listening (extrapolating on a quote by Walter Ong); "life exists only as it is going out of existence"⚇, then maybe the part of life i should be focusing on is whats existing in the current, but with a soft but clear and separate revervance (and certain acknowledgement) for what existed in the past and the ways it continues to shape the world around me. maybe i should be focusing on living in what is, rather than obsessed with depicting what was.