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

—katnancy, 2026

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

hello, strangelings <3

I am katnancy. I was blessed to be born and raised by the rainforests, beaches and mudflats of Gimuy, Yidinji Country.

I am of the Cumti-Bihacon clan, a family tree rooted in the mountains of Ifugao in so-called The Philippines. My family name Cumti means ‘fireflies’ in Tuwali-Ifugao, our ancestral language and my father’s first language before he moved to Manila to study and learned Tagalog, and then English when he immigrated to regional North Queensland. As a teenager I named myself katnancy in an act of reclamation and self-definition. My chosen name honours my anglo, maternal grandmother, Nancy, who raised her two children in rural North Queensland as a single mother, and before her passing, was the only member of my biological, maternal lineage that I was not estranged from.

After graduating from public school in Gimuy, and taking a recovery gap year swimming in the rainforest, in 2015 I moved to Magandjin / Meanjin / Brisbane to formally study photographic art practice. These years were pivotal in developing my own photographic voice and research skills. Alongside my formal photo studies, through self-led study and supported by a local volunteer-based ecology of artist-run spaces, I expanded my work into installation.

In 2017 I did a semester of exchange studies in Manitoba, Treaty 1 Territory, so-called Canada. There I studied video art, and for the first time was effectively empowered to develop a genuine interest in art history, and my own voice as an arts writer. Through community and free, local, artist-run events, I was introduced to experimental film and expanded cinema.

I returned to finish my studies in Australia, and as the final course of my undergraduate degree, in December 2018 I partook in the Doing Visual Politics symposium in Nepal which sparked in me a deeper understanding and lasting interest in the ethics around photography and archives. These conversations were so interesting and important that I wished I’d double-majored and studied photo documentary / photojournalism instead of just photographic art practice, in which the ethics-in-practice of relational photo-politics were not thoroughly addressed.

In 2018 I came to realise I wouldn’t stay in Meanjin because the possible pathways for artists there (commercial / being picked up by a gallery, academic / landing a teaching position, technical / becoming a technician, curatorial/administrative / becoming a curator/administrator) did not feel accessible or compatible with me. The latter was the final blow because it’s the one I really thought could be possible for me but I was shown that a curator also had to be academically excellent and that I didn’t belong there either. It hurt the most because I had completely believed I was called to do it, and realising I couldn’t reminded me of how many of the other pathways were blocked for the exact same reason. I knew that if this was what I was experiencing, I’m never the only one, and that I had the seemingly life-long task of adapting and finding or else developing some kind of alternative for us. Since I was very young I’ve had these dreams in which I’m facilitating some kind of school or house for artists. Whether finding and serving an existing thing like this, or developing into a person who could create it, I had to continue my search toward the spaces and dynamics I kept returning to in the dreams.

In 2019 I returned to Manitoba where I knew and had experienced a ready willingness for people to collaborate, make work, and be in critical conversation, and there wasn’t the requirement of academic excellence to partake. This is where I met the friends who became my mentors who continue to help me to sustain my practice. Because my mentors are primarily experimental moving-image artists based in North America, I prioritise experimental moving-image over my other modes of practice because I am able to ask questions and be mentored in that medium and its distribution system, which applies beyond national borders.

I spent the majority of my life between 16 January 2017 to 17 January 2026 in Manitoba, collaborating with fellow artists, working and volunteering as an administrator in artist-run spaces, facilitating gatherings and teaching experimental photography and experimental film workshops. There I was able to curate my ongoing self-led studies via immersion in the rich arts programming around me which included many free workshops, courses, and drop-in arts programs, public art, lots of drag shows, intergenerational conversations, healthy cross-pollination and collaboration between visual arts, performing arts, sound art and music, engaged with by a keen local community.

In 2025 I had a dream that showed me that the next beat in my story was that I must return to my place of birth, and in 2026, I did.

//

I perceive/experience/believe art to be the Truth-seeking sinew of society — social, relational, spiritual, educational and healing practice — the fire we gather ‘round, reminding us to remember — we are all connected. Kapwa.

I practice photomedia, grounding in the materiality of experimental photography (drawing with light + chemistry), and expanding this into experimental film & video (time), site-responsive, participatory 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, 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 the images begin to sing themselves into existence, transform, layer, obscure or retract themselves. I, in turn, Listen.

I have always been an artist but when I was in grade 4 I decided I would become a teacher. With each thing I learn, I find a way to teach it forward. Accessibility is something I think about a lot. If I use a specific medium, are those who look to me able to also access and utilise that medium? Digital image-making is more accessible than other things I’ve done — it doesn’t require space to respond to, like I needed in order to develop installations, it doesn’t require printing costs or access to a darkroom, like my printed photomedia and celluloid film practices. I grieved that I lost access to these practices that felt so freeing to me, just as I grieved other pathways and forms I thought my teaching may take, but I focus on framing these constraints as a stimulating challenge.

Currently constrained to only doing my work through this one medium, plane, space of digital (moving) image-making, how may I open and study the image frame as if it were architecture, and then respond to the properties of that architecture? How may I care for each frame in an animation with the intentionality we imbed into one single still photograph to be framed on a wall, thinking about the condensing of time, intention, and attention as a material practice? How can a digital-image-making practice satisfy my hunger for tactility, mystery, and Spiritual sympoiesis with chance, that was achieved through my celluloid film and darkroom practices? How may I teach and curate through an artwork? How may an artwork become a metanarrative of itself and the artist’s practice in a way that serves as a lesson plan? How may other artists and their work as exemplars and contemporaries be included in the work that honours and maps their influences? Those are the challenges I tasked myself with while creating my latest work Transference, and as I evolve into my next projects.

🌈♡ps. happy pride 5 eva. i hope you’ve been dancing.

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} ↩︎