Editoriat

Bio

Editoriat is the work of Fiona Cullinan, a Birmingham-based artist who works with collage, décollage, text, printing, performance and creative walking.

Her visual art is presented via the Instagram account Editoriat where she remixes magazine text and imagery to disrupt idealised narratives and form alternative views. Much of this is focused on representations of women. Her work has been shown in group shows and zines.

Live artworks include sitting surveillances, and devising and documenting walks through lenses such as safety, surveillance, gentrification and gender+age. A frequent focus of these walks is how women are seen (or not), playing with ideas of invisibility, consent, and who has the freedom to walk where and when.

She has been commissioned by The Dazzle Club and University of Birmingham, funded as a lead artist in the British Council’s Connections Through Culture, and had an anti-fear walk recipe published in a walk anthology.

Fiona is also a co-founder of Walkspace, a co-operative of 25+ artists and creatives in the West Midlands region who use walking in their practice.

Artist statement

As an often invisible older woman, I play with ideas of female visibility and representation. In particular, I use collage, décollage, text, printing, performance and creative walking tactics to explore how women are seen, or unseen.­­

I’m a former magazine subeditor and, for years, worked in a world that often objectified, infantilised, stereotyped or erased women. I now remix magazines to disrupt, subvert or rip up such media narratives.

I also explore visibility and invisibility through creative walking tactics. As a co-founder of the Walkspace cooperative in the West Midlands, I’ve devised night walks, ‘Crone Walks’ and anti-surveillance walks, and have been commissioned to ‘disappear’.

My influences include psychogeography, feminist art movements and collage, particularly the work of Linder Sterling, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Nancy Spero and Sophie Calle, and walking artists such as Monique Besten and Kubra Khademi. I also love the street paste-up art of Foka Wolf and billboard activism of the Guerrilla Girls. My work aims to counter the dominant Western narratives of patriarchy and capitalism, and to carry alternative messages of age, gender and presence.