Kym McDaniel

Artist Statement

I am an experimental filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist working across fields of moving image, choreography, and disability studies. I am mainly interested in using movement and gesture to explore the vulnerability of living in a disabled body and world.

I began filmmaking after a head injury in my early 20s prevented me from pursuing dance as a formal performance career. My films are within the legacy of feminist experimental filmmakers who used the personal as a strategy to generate new visions for the female body existing in time and culture. As a queer femme and invisibly disabled person and dancer, I exist between constructed worlds of the able/disabled, healthy/sick, straight/gay, and movement/stasis. I negotiate my internal experience to external world through fragmented bodies on screen, healing rituals rooted in metaphor, using the interior apartment as a landscape, and inviting the audience to be part of my experience through voice, text, or instruction. My choice to work in nonlinear and improvisational methods of production is rooted in the inherent pleasure and curiosity of discovering new and unpredictable methods of existing in relationship to one another and our own bodies.

Ultimately, my practice is a method of resistance and healing outside of patriarchal and capitalist power structures that typically insist upon one way of embodying the world. Moving images, writing, choreography, and collaboration are attempts to rewire neuronal pathways of pain and transmutate suffering. I shoot in my apartment for pain management, accessibility, and control. I use text on screen to communicate stories that cannot be spoken. I edit until my body tells me to stop. I don’t pretend to possess the magic necessary to solve the mystery of chronic pain. Instead, through my practice, I attend to the grief of my body and world.