MILOU
STELLA

Milou Stella's interdisciplinary art practice challenges and questions normative concepts of identity, gender, and social categorisation by merging digital technology, animation, performance, sound, and painting.

Through their hybrid artworks - sculptures, installations, and multimodal performances - they aim to resist simplistic binaries and categories, blurring boundaries through collaborations and research. Stella's artistic practice explores the tension between the individual and the collective and reimagines visual poetics rooted in folklore and storytelling. Her practice is about resistance and relationships.

They use sound clips, field recordings, and personal texts as starting points for creative experiments that include participation, conversation and devising techniques as part of their process, drawing inspiration from thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Joan Joan, Michel Foucault, and ideas from Glitch feminism and experimental and improv theatre which they embed within their performances.

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By embracing hybridity, Stella creates opportunities for sharing visions of playful simultaneous inner realities, celebrating expansive ways of seeing and being in the world. Their work invites us to question and deconstruct societal norms and to embrace the beauty and complexity of fluid and dynamic identities.

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Her work was recently exhibited as part of Traces: Stories of Migrations (2021, Poplar) in partnership with London College of Fashion and Making For Change; and in Utopia: Eco-Feminisms, Art from Heart (2021, Mile End). She was the main visual artist of The Molly’s Masquerade (2020-21) in partnership with St Margaret’s House and Heads Bodies Legs Theatre (Arts Council England, Heritage Fund UK). This was a year long queer community and participatory project where Stella contributed a textile installation exploring the intersectionality of the lives of 18th century London queer pioneers. She also co-led the R&D Imagi-Nation.png exploring the radical meaning of ‘care’ through electronic music and performance with theatre maker and Japanese punk musician Kazuko Hohki and participants from the Carers Centre of Tower Hamlets, using digital technology, online events and improv music techniques to devise the future of the project.