Break the Frame in Rhythms of Chance.
Dance. Dance. Dance.

—katnancy, 2026

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

hello, strangelings <3

Born and raised by the rainforests and beaches of Gimuy / Cairns in Far North Queensland, so-called Australia, I’m an artist who loves artists, listens to & as art, and writes, and writes, and writes, and edits, and edits, and edits, into oblivion, sometimes.

I am of the Cumti-Bihacon clan, a family tree rooted in Kiangan, the heartland of the Ifugao, in the mountainous heart of Luzon, the northern island of so-called The Phillipines. My family name, Cumti, means fireflies in our ancestral dialect Tuwali-Ifugao, my father’s first language before he learned Tagalog and then English.

I carry the name of my anglo maternal grandmother, Nancy, who raised her two children as a single mother in Charters Towers. In 2015, the same year I moved to Magandjin / Brisbane and began my studies in Photographic Art Practice, my nana Nancy developed dementia, and having no known Will, her house and belongings were absorbed by The State to cover the cost of her care. Though I wish I had inherited nana’s excessive collection of cat ornaments, I have no heirlooms from her except 2 photographs from her youth that sit on my alter.

I also have my mother’s obsessive, disorderly archive of thousands of 35mm photographs she made of me and my brother when we were children (which she said she made for us). Repeatedly forced photographic depictions which speak little of the Truth about what was happening outside their constructed frames — photographs as gaslighting. I became the caretaker of this fraught archive, which I have instead of my own archive of belongings that my mother disallowed me to take with me when I turned 12 and left her, as soon as I legally could. The key to my freedom was to work with Mother Universe, to Listen to the lessons being offered to me — I must wake up and stay awake to reality, to see through lies into Truth no matter how ugly, scary or painful, learn my rights / stay sharp against coercive forces that rely on my naivety, exhaustion and confusion, be adaptive and resourceful, transcend my conditioning and enact my power to choose. I wielded these same lessons in the process of getting sober from alcohol at age 28 after 10 years of spiralling addiction. My art practice, which includes my research, is how I wield my own agency to discern and depict myself and my reality, through reclamation, remix and wilful obscurity, toward liberation.

I practice photomedia, grounding in the materiality of experimental photography (drawing with light + chemistry), and expanding this into experimental film & video (time), installation (space) and happenings (live co-creation). Through these I live out my desire to break the frame and rip the script eg. cut, tear, scratch, lick, bite, burn, kiss¹, melt, rot, glitch², remix³ and re-member⁴ the photograph as an embodied act of rejecting socialised barriers produced by and for hegemonies through images. These become rituals to stay awake, and remember to remember the constructed and manipulative of nature of representation and perception, and their influence on determining value, power, priority and disposability. I consider the camera obscura / dark chamber / darkroom as womb space, and the photographic process as séance… making possible windows of communication and collaboration [art as invitation⁵] between worlds, and co-conceiving and midwifing new worlds that may not exist or be perceived without the photographic process (& all its interferences). The ritual repetition in experimental photo & animation processes conjures a rhythmic dance, mirroring the rhythmic visual incantations spoken/sung by the images (within, without, between, beyond themselves). Through sympoiesis with chance as an act of faith/suspension of disbelief, I surrender control and dictation, and the images begin to sing themselves into existence, transform, layer, obscure or retract themselves. I, in turn, Listen.

2023-Present

2015-2022 (19-26)

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ♡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

Footnotes:

1. _{When I include kissing in this list, I’m considering the kiss as conscious protest and mutual disarmament. “[Heidi] Dorow described kissing as a blood pact. ‘Everyone in the world tells me to be afraid of you, and that you’re a danger,’ was how she described its rationale. Kissing someone refuted this. It was a way of saying, ‘I’m not afraid of you. I’m with you.’” Making Out, Making Change: The History of Queer Kiss-Ins by Stef Rubino —Jan 13, 2025} ↩︎
2. _{“Glitch Is Error
   We are the most fantastic and beautiful mistake. Never meant to survive, we are still here: an error in the algorithm. We are not empty signifiers, however; we are not dead-end hyperlinks. We reject the violent act of naming. We will reconfigure ourselves as we see fit. Modifying and recoding, we choose our own names, build our own families and communities, proudly fail in the present as we dream new futures.”— Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Russel, L, 2020} ↩︎
3. _{“Glitch Is Remix
   Affirming our role in building new worlds, we will imagine, innovate, and remix. We will rearrange and repurpose by any means necessary, rendering what rises from this rebirth unrecognizable from the violence of its original. We will create fissures in the social and cultural algorithm as an active act of advocacy, advocating for the user, advocating for ourselves and advocating for one another.” — Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Russel, L, 2020} ↩︎
4. _{“Filipino indigenous cultures and the concepts we borrow such as Kapwa and Loob are all primarily Land-based. University of the Philippines Humanities professor, Felipe de Leon, Jr. names Filipino culture as inherently shamanistic and animistic. The animist worldview asserts that all of creation is sacred. It is the role and function of the Babaylan to mediate between the world of the spirits and the human and non-human world and re-member for us the deep connectedness between worlds; thus suturing and healing the split in our psyche.” — Mendoza Strobel, L, 2010, BABAYLAN: Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous, introduction here} ↩︎
5. _{“New worlds are born from invitations.” — McIntyre, L and Cumti, k, 2024, like a fire we gather round: Phytograms, Ecologies, and Multivocal Agency} ↩︎
6. _{“art at its core is this human technology of empathy.” — Val, Artists Shouldn’t Network, 2026, video essay}
   
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