PROFILE: The Acts of Katy B. Plummer

A sense of reckoning reverberates through Katy B. Plummer’s practice as she moves from strength to strength, continuing to navigate the complexity of female identity, motherhood and creative matrilineage, viewed as a series of acts presented as theatrical video installations.

Katy B. Plummer, 'Margaret and the Grey Mare' (still), 2024, three-channel HD video, Liverpool Powerhouse, Sydney. Video by Kuba Dorabialski.

After winning the Fishers Ghost Open Art Award last year for her epic video installation Margaret and the Grey Mare, 2023, opportunities across the theatre, opera and art world are opening for Katy B. Plummer. She has also begun a new major work that integrates these three spheres of practice, deconstructing and reconfiguring them with distinctive Plummer magic.

A self-professed theatre kid, Plummer has always had a love for the world of theatre and opera, as she states, “It has always been about that relationship between a performer and an audience. At its core it’s about performing for an audience on a stage.”

The elements of theatre—the stage, the costumes, the performer and the audience—are all materials for her to play with as she builds narrative and form. Understanding, and taking on board each of these roles, and recognising the prevailing theatrical tropes, enables Plummer to also subvert them—helping her to break down the fourth wall between the audience and the actors. As director, she holds the strings to the delicate balance of truth and fiction within the architecture of theatre, as she entangles the viewer within a half-built set, or draws attention to the heavily hand-stitched costumes, imbuing her fabricated world with an absurdist, gritty realism.

Margaret and the Grey Mare is the first opera Plummer has written. A story of sacrifice, it is an examination of greater narratives of cultural identity and female experience. The hour-long opera is set within a forest at the height of the European witch trials in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The audience follows the protagonist, Margaret, weighed down with the emotional trauma of being haunted by a Witchfinder by day and the ghostly Grey Mare by night. Filmed at the Casula Powerhouse, the opera was presented as a video installation, inviting the viewer to enter the theatrical space of the set, framed by red velvet curtains, with seating provided.

Katy B. Plummer, ‘The Witch Lays Her Eggs in Terrible Clumps’ (still), 2022, single channel, HD Video. Video by Kuba Dorabialski.

The rich materiality of the immersive experience is central to Plummer’s work.  It’s late under the Table of the Women, 2024–25, at the Murray Art Museum Albury is a commissioned installation for children, and a lighter play on the themes of ghosts, haunted houses and magic. Epically proportioned, it includes handmade soft sculptures of legs, feet and arms that dangle from the ceiling to the floor. Here, again, the visibility of her handiwork is intentional. “It’s like high school theatre, it’s all old and badly made, but there is that magic where it all comes together—I love that theatrical magic,” Plummer enthuses.

The recurring elements in her soft-sculptural installations go back to the artist’s undergraduate final work at UNSW Art and Design (then College of Fine Arts), Sydney. She recounts, “My final work was a play called Soft Prosthetics, 1999, and all of these paintings were characters in a play. They all had legs and were all singing to each other. There was this big soft strap-on prosthetic tree limb lying on the ground, and all the paintings were standing around it, shocked, because they had all been tricked into thinking it was a real part of the tree.”

Reflective of Plummer’s early engagement with painting that crosses over into sculpture at art school, her work goes beyond the two-dimensional space of the picture plane. “It comes straight out of painting. Painting is canvas, so it’s soft being held up by rigid. The architectural equation of a painting is stretcher bars with fabric—and you can create a world within that. Even with a set, it is rigid and floppy. And how do we turn those into a story?”

Katy B. Plummer, ‘We believe you Babcia’ (still), 2024, single channel, HD video. Video by Kuba Dorabialski.

Plummer is able to play out the different facets of her identity within these fantastical created worlds. Two recent works, The Ubiquitous Myth of the Eerie Wife, 2025, and We Believe you Babcia!, 2024, examine the many threads of motherhood including the impact of motherhood on creativity, and the maternal creative lineage passed onto her children.

Set against the backdrop of Swan Lake, The Ubiquitous Myth of the Eerie Wife narrates the story line in subtitles as it is being acted out by two young dancers taking part in a ballet lesson. They are accompanied by a distilled piano score, in which the music slows and progressively distorts into a hallucinatory meditation of the young dancers as the video takes a turn to the paranormal. At the final performance, fiction and reality blur as Plummer subverts the fourth wall between the audience and the performers as they all become part of the play. The final scene presents the three generations of women and children, in costume, posing as characters.

Katy B. Plummer, ‘The Ubiquitous Myth of the Eerie Wife’ (still), 2025, single channel, HD video. Maitland Regional Art Gallery, NSW. Video by Kuba Dorabialski.

Collaboration has been a constant feature of Plummer’s work, whether it is working with opera and theatre professionals, or working with her family, including her children and partner, Kuba Dorabialski. Margaret and the Grey Mare led her to work with her sister, Margaret Plummer, who is a principal artist with the Vienna State Opera, as well as opera singer Michael Honeyman and concert pianist Sally Whitwell. Pushing the possibilities of spiritual collaboration, she has also used a chatbot coded to act as a channel to an ancient Celtic land spirit. Of this new stage in her practice, Plummer  reflects, “I love working deeply with people who are really good at something I don’t normally have access to, and who are willing to share their insights and skills, like brilliant sentient art materials.”

EXHIBITIONS

Margaret and the Grey Mare
1-30 March 2026
Vitalstatistix, Port Adelaide, SA

Margaret and the Grey Mare
20 July – 1 November 2026
Wagga Wagga Regional Gallery, NSW

Margaret and the Grey Mare
1-30 November 2026
The Substation, Newport, VIC

Images courtesy of the artist, Zoe Lonergan, Kuba Dorabialski, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Maitland Regional Art Gallery and Chrissy Hall Photography.

Lucy Stranger is the Deputy Editor of Artist Profile

This article first appeared in Artist Profile Issue 72