Molly Palmer

Molly Palmer works within and between the media of filmmaking, installation, sculpture and choreography. Using hand made props, sets and costumes, she green screens protagonists into layered video worlds where music, gesture and dialogue form cyclical narratives exploring the strangeness concealed within ordinary things. Her practice is episodic and accumulative, encouraging porous membranes between past, present and future. By generating spaces that are visibly handmade, she builds a hybrid culture dislocated from the slick virtual worlds we are immersed in daily; a timeless no-place with its own rhythm and logic, where reality and fiction become destabilised and intertwined. Palmer’s installations explore the potential of sculptural sets and surround sound to produce a heightened physical encounter with the work. The fractured narratives that unfold within these environments explore the transformative potential of intention and belief, often seeking resolution for difficult experiences – shifts of perception brought by sorrow, loss, anxiety, mental health fluctuations or trauma. The art historical and theoretical is filtered through personal experience and diverse visual cultures from design, architecture, theatre, films and TV. Consequently, her time-based assemblages create spaces that are strange yet familiar; narratives that are sometimes funny, bewildering and beautiful but can also be disorienting, emotionally enigmatic, sad or frightening. Although visually dream-like this work is not intended as fantasy. Instead it offers a step sideways into parallel worlds that allow us to examine and enjoy the complexity and absurdity of being human.

Molly Palmer was Artist in Residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, where she has exhibited at the Open in 2021 and prepared solo shows for 1646 in the Hague and Ty Pawb in Wales. She graduated from Royal Academy Schools in 2016, where she was awarded the Gold Medal. She received Arts Council England’s Creative Practice Development Fund and has exhibited widely at galleries and museums, a.o. Nest, Den Haag (2023); Buitenplaats Doornburgh, Maarssen, NL (2023); Dastan Basement, Tehran (2021); 1946, The Hague (2019); TENT, Rotterdam (2019), Somerset House, London (2018); House of Egorn, Berlin (2018); Art Basel Miami Beach (2016); Bikini Wax & MUPO, Mexico (2016); Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paolo (2016) and Glasgow Project Room (2018). Forthcoming exhibitions include solo shows at Buitenplaats Doornburgh, and Bosse and Baum London