Molly Palmer

Molly Palmer works between sound, film, installation, sculpture and choreography. Using handmade props and costumes, her protagonists enter layered video worlds where music, gesture and dialogue form cyclical narratives exploring the strangeness concealed within ordinary things. Her practice is episodic and accumulative, encouraging porous membranes between past, present and future. By generating spaces that are visibly handmade, she builds a hybrid no-place with its own rhythm and logic, where reality and fiction become destabilised and intertwined.

Palmer’s installations explore the potential of scenography and surround sound to produce a heightened physical encounter with the work. The fractured narratives that unfold within them explore the transformative potential of intention and belief, often seeking resolution for difficult experiences. Her research and long term collaborations value shifts of perception that alter our relation to reality, tuning into the psychedelic dimensions of experiences such as grief, complex trauma and diagnosed difference. Their looping subjectivities create spaces that are strange yet familiar; narratives that are sometimes funny, bewildering and beautiful but can also be emotionally enigmatic, sad or disorienting. Although visually dream-like, this work is not intended as fantasy. Instead it opens parallel worlds where we can examine and enjoy the complexity and absurdity of being human.

Palmer is an alumni of Rijksakademie, Amsterdam and Royal Academy, London. Recent exhibitions include Amulet at Het HEM (2024); Continuum at Art Brussels , (2024); Cycle, Portal, Path at NEST, The Hague (2023); Signal at Buitenplaats Doornburgh, Utrecht (2023) and Password at Akinci Gallery, Amsterdam (2022).