Circus: Acts of Assembly –
Unruly Kinships

Dr Cat Dunn is a Black researcher, lecturer, and Storycatcher whose work advances Indigenous curating and social justice. Drawing on her Barbadian heritage, she leads an independent curatorial practice that interrogates identity, power, and representation, creating spaces for critical dialogue and deeper cultural understanding.

Her practice centres the lived experiences of women from the global majority and addresses the enduring legacies of colonialism, slavery, racism, and feminism. Through research-driven curatorial projects, Dunn brings forward hidden, marginalised, or misrepresented histories, reshaping how these narratives are recorded, interpreted, and shared.

Committed to reimagining cultural narratives and challenging entrenched perceptions, Dunn’s work invites audiences and institutions to engage with complex histories and contemporary social realities. She actively collaborates with communities, artists, and organisations to develop projects that foster empowerment and structural change.

Dunn is actively engaged in partnerships that seek to reimagine cultural narratives and support structural change within the arts. She welcomes opportunities to co-develop exhibitions, public programmes, and interdisciplinary projects that foster critical engagement and empower communities.
She holds a PhD from the University of Dundee and an MLitt with Distinction in Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) from the University of Glasgow. Her academic contributions include visiting lectureships at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and The Glasgow School of Art.

Divine Tasinda is an international multidisciplinary artist. Born in Congo raised in Scotland. Divine specialises with dance, fashion, and music. Founder / director of Three60 company and House of KUNGI. Divine's movement is influenced by African traditional dance and street dance, specialising in hip-hop, Afro, dancehall, experimental, and variations of other styles within street Dance and technical style, such as contemporary.

Tilda Williams-Kelly (she/her) b.1999  is a Scottish painter and visual artist based in Stirling whose work centres the study of figure, light, colour and environment within a context of oil and mixed-media painting. While utilising traditional oil techniques, she blends life drawing and outdoor sketching with mark making, abstraction and imagination. 

Working with acrylic, spray paint, charcoal, pastel, ink, and gouache, she creates vibrant works that respond to observation and intimacy. Tilda is interested in alchemaic phenomena within the act of painting that devotes to manipulating properties to create works that both allude to and transcend nature. 

Tilda’s interests lie in engaging storytelling and mythos to address histories of erasure often visited on Black bodies. In opposition to this, she chooses to represent the Black figure in compositions that evoke power and magic. Pursuits are based in community arts activism, collaboration, and research within socio-political settings such as anti-racism, intersectional feminism, and climate justice.

Tilda’s practice also involves writing, her undergraduate dissertation titled Sister Painter, Misogynoir, Intersectionality and Black British Women’s Painting was published in 2022, the first paper to be published with Boom Graduate Publications and is available in most online book stores. She also published a climate justice blog with Creative Dundee’s The Full Picture 2: How can we build a local and collective climate justice movement? 

Tilda received the Graham Laing Award for Excellence in Painting and Sculpture in 2022, and was selected by the Alumni Committee of Hospitalfield for the Joan Cuthill Painting Bursary as part of the Graduate Residency Programme 2023-24. 

Mirae kh RHEE is an artist-researcher, writer, and activist whose work engages material culture, diasporic identity, and the historical lives of textiles. Recent practice has focused on sambe, the traditional Korean hemp cloth, exploring its role as a living archive, carrier of embodied histories, and medium for collective care. The work traces how cloth carries social histories across generations and geographies. This ongoing engagement has gradually opened into a broader inquiry into plant-based textile traditions, considering how fibers such as hemp and jute became entangled with global trade, colonial economies, and systems of labor.

Invited to the CIRCUS: Acts of Assembly – Unruly Kinships residency, RHEE brings this research into a setting shaped by collective making, ritual, and exchange. The residency provides an opportunity to continue a material investigation that moves between textile practice, historical inquiry, and shared processes of learning. By following the paths of fiber plants and the knowledge embedded in their transformation into cloth, the project reflects on how textile traditions travel, persist, and shift meaning across cultures. Within this unfolding research, cloth becomes a way of thinking about kinship, care, and connection across histories and geographies.