Kadie Salmon is a Scottish artist, writer, and curator based in Margate, with an MFA in Sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art (2009). Her practice moves across sculpture, photography, painting, moving image, and poetry — but analogue photography sits at the heart of it, used as a physical material to explore narrative structures and the boundary between truth and fiction.
At the core of her work is an exploration of the historical suppression of women's sexuality and a challenge to the ways female desire has been framed as dangerous, irrational, or monstrous. This research has driven her practice for the past 15 years, deepening her commitment to reclaiming these narratives through embodied, lived experience. Her practice is site specific, taking her across Europe — Norway, Finland, the mountains of Montserrat in Spain — drawn to places where folklore rooted in female sexuality, nature, and the body still runs close to the surface. This relationship runs through everything she makes: films and photographs which place the body directly within these environments, and sculptural work constructed from photographic papers physically manipulated into three dimensional forms, organic and geological in character. Informed by feminist theory, geology, and folklore, Salmon uses choreographed performance and multiple exposure on 120mm film to explore a fragmented sense of self. The photographs and films are hand painted — a process with a long gendered history — producing work that resists narrow definitions of femininity, embracing something more complex and shifting.
Salmon shows regularly with New Art Projects, London, and exhibits internationally, with shows at Charleston Trust, SPRING/BREAK New York, and Artexte Montreal. She is the recipient of awards and residencies including the Henry Moore Foundation, Arts Council England, and the European Cultural Fund. Her work has been written about in the Guardian, British Vogue, and the Art Newspaper, and has been the subject of critical essays by writers including Maria Walsh. She has collaborated with Canadian-South African poet Klara du Plessis since 2018, with their most recent chapbook Skin and Meat Sky published by Knife Fork Book, Canada (2022). Salmon is also co-founder of art collective Captain Lightfoot (est. 2012), which works with galleries and universities to expand research into narrative, visual art, and curation through collaborative projects, exhibitions, and talks.