Kate McMillan is a British/Australian multi-disciplinary visual artist based at King’s College London. She collaborates with various scholars and artists through interests in listening practices as a method of responding to wider social issues in the development of immersive installations for audiences. She has spent over twenty years exploring the ways in which some histories are heard, and others are minimised; what Tuana and Sullivan (2014) call an ‘epistemology of ignorance’. McMillan often explores oceans and riverways as spaces that literally drown global majority voices and elevate others. She has developed a method of working with communities, non-human voices and collaborators that she calls ‘listening with her feet’ to enable resistance to what she has recently coined ‘the auditory ceiling’ – a way of describing power systems that have limited tolerances for complaint. McMillan has written and made work on ‘islands of empire’ - sites she argues create heightened ideological spaces and serve as liminal spaces that can be made to disappear. Part of McMillan’s approach to her creative work is to build on ideas of ‘speculative fiction’ by imagining alternative histories and futures. This has primarily been to address gaps in the archive, but in various works has been an approach to provide optimistic narratives with creativity as a central tenet. Her work has been commissioned and curated into museums, biennales and exhibitions across the world.

McMillan also writes and advocates for a more equitable visual arts ecology and has sat on various boards, advisory groups and funding panels in the UK and Australia. She was the annual author of the highly cited Representation of Women Artists in Britain from 2017-2021 and has published multiple articles and reports on gender inequality in the art world. She is currently on the Advisory Board for The Colab/Artist Garden, the only sculpture garden dedicated to women artists in the world, and with whom she is collaborating on a research project to explore the absence of women artists in the realm of public art in the UK.

Research interests and PhD supervision

McMillan's supervision expertise aligns with her own research in the visual arts which includes interests in gender inequality, the residue of colonialism, arts-based research methods and social justice. She has supervised PhDs on:

• Gender Inequality in the Art World
• Arts Based Research Methods and Creative Practice
• Art & Craft practices in the Global South
• Memory, Identity and Contemporary Art

Teaching

McMillan convenes and lectures on specialist contemporary art modules, as well as gender inequality in the CCIs. She oversees arts-based research methods in the department.

Expertise and public engagement

McMillan is a regular public speaker on gender inequality in the art world. She has been interviewed for various television networks and documentaries on the art world, as well as an expert contributor to the industry.

Selected publications

• McMillan, K. (2023). Listening with Our Feet: Decolonial and Feminist Arts-Based Methodologies in Addressing Australian Incarceration Policies on Nauru and Manus Islands. In: Fuggle, S., Forsdick, C., Massing, K. (eds) Framing the Penal Colony. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
• McMillan, K., & England, L. (2022). Gendered Obstacles in Contemporary Art: The Art Market, Motherhood and Invisible Ecologies. Journal of Gender, Culture and Society, 2(2), 24–38.
• McMillan, K. (2022). A Woman’s Work: Why is the National Gallery of Australia’s Gender Equity Action Plan necessary? In J. Higgie (Ed.), The Annual (1 ed., Vol. 1, pp. 29-35). National Gallery of Australia.
• McMillan, K. (2021). Contextualising the Statistical Landscape: Revisioning Cultural Ecologies of Care. In R. Morris, & C. Bertola (Eds.), A-N Artists Newsletter (2 ed., Vol. 2, pp. 4-9). a-n The Artist Information Company.
• McMillan, K. (2021). Representation of Women Artists in Britain 2020. In Representation of Women Artists in Britain 2020 Freelands Foundation, 86 p.