Kaitlin Armstrong

Artist Statement

I am an audio artist working at the intersection of documentary and sound art. I mix interviews, music, and ambient sound to create pieces examining memory, identity, and the relationship between narrative and perception. My work spans long-form podcasts to experimental audio shorts on settler myths, forgotten histories, and personal heartbreaks.

I am preoccupied with the power of narrative to organize perception, illuminate and obscure truth, impose and destabilize order, as well as with the politics of memory: what is foregrounded and erased; who shapes what endures; how memory’s permutations haunt the present and imagined futures. My documentaries investigate how these themes ripple from individual to collective, and how what is erased or misremembered symbolically seeps into narrative frames.

I approach documentary as musical composition, weaving fragments (recorded interviews, music, found sound) into lyric audio pieces. My work is deeply researched, drawing from personal and historical archives, and genre-fluid. I borrow from and subvert memoir, documentary, essay, and cultural critique to manage and challenge audience expectations, always with attention to how form produces meaning.

While I employ journalistic methods, I embrace subjectivity and am conscious of how my positionalities - settler, woman, white, Latina - shape my thinking and implicate me in the topics I deconstruct. My work explores complex topics not to seek resolution, but to chart the texture of their ambiguities and create sonic spaces for listeners to sit with unsettled material. Some truths are best elucidated by staging their contradictions, which is ultimately what my work aims to do.