Kat Thompson: Our Flesh Is Tired 

Exhibition Statement: 

Our Flesh Is Tired traces the slow, intimate labor of holding together a self shaped by movement, inheritance, and the stories objects carry about us. The title speaks to a collective fatigue, held not only in the body but in the materials that travel alongside it: cloth, landscapes, souvenirs, and fragments that move across water. It gestures toward the tenderness and strain of assembling a diasporic identity in a world that repeatedly tries to simply repackage or fix it into place.

Through textiles, photographs, and recontextualized Jamaican souvenirs, this practice considers the complexity of diasporic identity through materials that both embody and shield the body. Fabric becomes veil and vessel, a means of protection as well as a way of asserting presence, care, and a form of nationhood shaped outside official borders. Recognizable Jamaican tourist objects are dismantled and folded into layered textile surfaces, interrupting the narratives they were designed to sell and allowing them to hold another kind of memory, one that is tactile, embodied, and unresolved.

Land appears in this work not as a singular site but as a patchwork of emotional, historical, and geographic terrains. Shores, wetlands, and other routes of water become metaphors for migration and return, echoing ancestral passages and diasporic crossings. These surfaces, where landscape and body are translated into fabric, image, and motion, resist closure. They remain open, provisional, and in motion, mirroring the ways identity is continually stitched together through displacement and longing. This invites viewers into an ongoing, restless process of assembling and reassembling the self.

Threaded throughout is an attention to how Black and brown bodies are translated into objects, images, and symbols, and how these forms, once set into circulation, take on lives of their own. Passed through many hands, they become diasporic themselves, carrying misrecognitions alongside moments of intimacy and care. In this space, tiredness is not collapse but accumulation, evidence of what has been carried, remade, and refused disappearance. Through fabric, fragmentation, and reimagined remnants of tourism, Our Flesh Is Tired offers a site where identity remains unfinished, porous, and always in the process of becoming.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kat Thompson is a lens-based artist and educator based in Virginia whose practice bridges photography, video, textiles, sculptural collage, and installation. By layering and interweaving these mediums, Thompson explores how images and objects hold memory, history, and identity, particularly within the context of the African Diaspora. Her work meditates on the construction of Black selfhood, considering how cultural memory, ancestral ties, and lived experience converge in both personal and collective narratives.

Thompson has presented solo exhibitions with 1708 Gallery (Richmond, VA), the Hamiltonian Artists Gallery (Washington, D.C.), and George Mason University. She has also exhibited throughout Virginia, the greater Washington, D.C. area, and Miami, including Page Bond Gallery (Richmond, VA) , Visible Records (Charlottesville, VA), the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, and Green Space Miami. She has participated in residencies at The Watermill Center, MASS MoCA, The Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA), the Torpedo Factory Post-Graduate Residency, and the VisArts Gibbs Street Residency. In 2023, she was awarded the Hamiltonian Artists Fellowship (2023–2025), a two-year program supporting emerging contemporary artists in Washington, D.C.

Thompson holds a BFA in Photography from George Mason University and an MFA in Photography & Film from Virginia Commonwealth University.

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