ALLEY CAT is a series of paintings that invites feline & feral articulations of remembering, and observes the displacement of the stray. Employing the archetypal cat as a liminal body within liminal spaces, Blacklaws ponders grief as something atmospheric and energetic.

Transience manifests into the physical form; the ALLEY CAT roams freely, between many worlds and its many lives.

Venus Blacklaws (b. 1999, Whakatāne) is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Publicly recognised for their work across performance, installation, costume design, and as part of the artist collective The Killing, Blacklaws’ practice is concerned with the mutability of the Body, and illusions of Self. Blacklaws draws from surrealist and drag conventions to unravel and re-present narratives of sex, gender, mythology and transformation into a single embodied language.