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.

here’s (some of) my story, babes:

I am of the Cumti-Bihacon clan, a family tree rooted in Kiangan, in the mountainous heart of Luzon, the northern island of so-called The Phillipines. Kiangan means place of origin or birthplace, and is the heartland of the Ifugao people. My family name, Cumti, means fireflies in our ancestral dialect Tuwali-Ifugao, my father’s first language before he learned Tagalog and then English, and moved to Australia as part of the balikbayan tradition (Filipinos move abroad as export labour, usually involving marriage, to earn and send money and gifts back to family in the homeland. In my case, it was my aunt Eliza, my Father’s eldest sister who married an anglo Australian man and then sponsored my father’s visa. Tita Eli’s husband John had a friend who also wanted a Filipina wife, and so they organised for him (my Uncle Snowy) to marry my Aunt Jane. Each of the three siblings in the diaspora had two children. Eliza, my father Francis, me and my younger brother Jarrod are based in Cairns, Jane and her two sons Chad and Billy in Charters Towers, Eli’s son Leslie in Brisbane, Eli’s daughter Marion moved to Kiangan and had 3 children of her own). Of the Australia-based branch of our family tree, Tita / Manang Eli is our Matriarch, and is now the eldest living sibling of the Felissa-Pablo (my paternal grandparents) clan.)

My parents met in Townsville through mutual friends, my mother saw my father, “thought he was cute” and claimed him, and the rest is… me, I suppose.

I’m long estranged from my maternal blood lineage, though I carry my maternal anglo grandmother’s name, Nancy, who raised her two children alone in Charters Towers where my mother’s father moved them, left them, and never returned. After the family moved north, he drove back to Victoria, where they had previously lived, to return to a lover and start another family, which became his inheritants. In 2015, the same year I moved to Meanjin / Brisbane and began my studies in Photographic Art Practice, my nana Nancy developed dementia, and having no Will, her house and belongings were acquired by the state to cover the cost of her care. I have no heirlooms from her, except 3 photographs from her youth that sit on my alter.

I also have my mother’s obsessive 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 conceal the Truth about what was happening outside their constructed frames — photographs as gaslighting. From when I was a baby, my mother exhibited obsession with my beauty, excessively pointing out how beautiful I was and how ugly she was. As I write this I consider that if my mother reads this she may break into my house, call me ungrateful, steal back the archive and destroy it out of spite. When I left my mother on my 12th birthday, she surprised me on my departure, announcing that I would be disallowed to take my belongings, and so I lost my archive and the things that had provided me solace amidst the storm. I never got to say goodbye to the things that had Spiritually become my Mother, like my pink CD player / radio that had been gifted to me on my 10th birthday by my nana, and whose sounds had lulled me to sleep, and through the night till the morning, every night for years. Although I asked and asked if I could get my things, and even JUST my CD player, to no avail, one year after I got away, my mother gaslit me that my things had been waiting for me the whole time and I had simply never come to claim them, but that since one year had now passed what had been my belongings were now legally hers. I become a protector of the inherently fraught archive, and wield my agency to depict myself and my reality, through reclamation and remix, toward liberation.

and here’s my statement:

I practice photomedia, grounding in the materiality of experimental photography (drawing with light + chemistry), and expanding this into experimental film (time), and installation (space). 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 and priority. 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.

---

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}
   
   ↩︎