Kayla Parker
Artist film-maker
United Kingdom °1955
research interests: animation, artists' moving image, landscape, place, new materialism
affiliation: University of Plymouth
en
Her research interests centre around subjectivity and place, embodiment and technological mediation, working with film-based and digital technologies to explore the interrelationship between the body and forgotten, liminal spaces.
The recipient of many awards, her experimental moving image artworks have been presented around the world, in touring programmes such as the ICA Biennials, and exhibitions and festivals, with television broadcasts on Channel 4, ITV and the BBC in the UK and in Australia, Canada, France, Austria, and Germany. In the 1990s she is notable for creating innovative animated films, such as the Arts Council-Channel 4 Animate! commissioned Cage of Flame (1992) and Sunset Strip (1996), along with As Yet Unseen (1994) for BFI Production, and Project, commissioned for the opening of the Lux Centre in 1997.
Her work since 2000 includes the films Inner City (2001) for Year of the Artist, and Small World (2007), commissioned for the Definitive Stories section of the National Review of Live Art, along with Teign Spirit (2009), an Animate Projects commission for Sea Change, and environmental direct animations such as Flora (2011) and Reach (2014). She was awarded the 2016 Plymouth-Nicosia Artist’s Residency at Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC), Republic of Cyprus, for Father-land, a collaborative film project with Stuart Moore, which premiered at NiMAC in the Layers of Visibility exhibition from Octover 2018 to January 2019.
Kayla is an experienced producer-director and co-founder of Sundog Media, the production company responsible for award-winning short films such as Heaven is a Place (2014), made with the LGBT community in Plymouth for the EU Cultural Programme, and Welcome to the Treasuredome, the 2-day festival of 360 artists’ moving image in Weymouth for the London 2012 Olympics, which attracted an audience of over two and a half thousand.
She holds a PhD in direct animation practice and gender. Her recent publications include a co-authored chapter in Routledge’s Community Filmmaking: Diversity, Practices and Places (2017).