Miriam Austin (b. 1984, New Zealand) lives and works in London and Oxford. Austin has a rich multidisciplinary practice that explores the relationship between ritual, myth, ecological fragility, and the politics of the body. Her work spans sculpture, installation, works on paper, video and performance.
Exploring the politically sensitive issues surrounding the appropriation and co-option of myths from non-Westen cultures, Austin’s work aims to establish alternative grounds for understanding and representing kinship. Using sculpture, experimental writing and video, her work traces new narratives that depict forms of relatedness situated within historical, futuristic and imagined contexts that cut against dominant approaches to landscape, environment and kinship found in patriarchal Western societies, seeking to reimagine the limits of the familial and expanding them to include a network of human and non-human actors.