Autumn Kioti Horne

Autumn Kioti Horne (they/them) is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and performer working across text, visual art, performance, and ecological engagement. Based in South Florida, Kioti Horne works with found, discarded, and site-responsive materials, allowing chance, weather, and place to shape the work.

An ongoing series of human-animal hybrids brings together unconventional cyanotype processes with Mylar, discarded textiles, shipping mailers, wallpaper, cardboard, thread, ink, gouache, and found matter. Seawater and rainwater, along with plants, dirt, and materials gathered from the immediate surroundings, become part of the printing process. Often mounted alone on plexiglass or directly onto the wall, the creatures meet the viewer’s gaze. This isolation allows the architecture of a site to enter the work. Each carries a small mythology.

Across installations, performance, text, Kioti Horne focuses on small creatures, forgotten women, gender-expansive bodies, and forms that resist containment. Their writing moves between poetry and performance, attending to breath, sound, and the stumble of language, with these rhythms shaping the spatial arrangement of words on the page.  Rooted in storytelling and local ecologies, the work emerges through collaboration, improvisation, and a playful attentiveness to environment.

Kioti Horne’s practice has been supported by residencies, grants, and institutions including the Santa Fe Art Institute, NYC Audubon, Art Monastery Italia, Cill Rialaig Artist Retreat, Last Frontier NYC, The Mothership Brooklyn, NOoSphere Arts, NMSA, Cultural Council for Palm Beach, and others. Their site-responsive performances have been commissioned and presented by museums, galleries, public art programs, and in unconventional spaces.

They are the founder of Sea Change Collective, a performance art project, and together with Suzanne Ankrum, they use art as a conduit for connection, reflection, and collective transformation.

____________________________

I make art to create connection–between people and the earth and the unseen forces that shape our lives, between all of us.

And how that manifests itself is… taking a flying leap off a cliff and building my wings on the way down. The only way I know how to exist as an artist is to take that leap, learning deeply from each success and, more importantly, failure. Even if it works, you know…we’re all sometimes Icarus.
​
Whether I am sharing a narrative through an installation made of found objects, a site-specific performance, poetry or a piece of two-dimensional art, I am always trying to offer a new old story. I want to illuminate the threads that tie us to place, its specific sun, its water, its textures, its histories, and to the deep mythologies and folktales that have lived in this soil of Earth longer than any of us. In each piece, I’m searching for both the immediacy of the moment and the deeper essence of the land beneath it.

A central part of my practice is recovering what has been lost; the stories and characters that have slipped through the cracks of time, been pushed aside or vilified by dominant narratives. I gravitate toward the forgotten figures and half-remembered myths, the unnamed women, the small creatures, the gender expansive, the imperfect, the uncontainable.  Bringing these lost stories back into the light is a way of stitching together past and present. It reminds us that the world is full of characters, human and more-than-human, who have created waves of resonance still lapping the shores of our collective unconscious.

Because my practice is responsive, I let the place and materials lead. I listen to the stories embedded in a shoreline, a wetland, a neighborhood, a vacant lot. I work with what is already there: the light, the debris, the community around it. I use repurposed materials not only because I am a self-taught artist who grew up making do with what was available, but because choosing discarded objects is itself a statement about value and waste, about what we overlook and what we refuse to care for.

This choice is also a form of environmental advocacy. My work often addresses the tangled threads of climate change, eco-feminism, identity, and the urgent need for wild spaces—especially how our relationship with the natural world shapes mental health. Using trash, found objects, and ephemeral materials allows me to mirror the precariousness of the ecosystems we inhabit.  Nothing is permanent, everything is interconnected, and the boundaries we draw between ourselves and the natural world are imagined.

My approach has been greatly influenced by María Irene Fornés, whose disregard for traditional structure and lack of “formal” education gave me permission to ignore expectation and finally trust those wings I’d been building. I refuse to confine myself to one discipline or one way of making. Instead, I let the work choose its own form: food, fiber, installation, movement, video, sound, performance, poetry. I follow the thread of curiosity and see where it leads.

Every piece I create is a kind of offering. I think of my work as a communion between myself, the viewer, and the more-than-human world that holds us both. I aim to blur the line between absurdity and reverence, the mundane and the sacred. Sometimes that means elevating an object that was thrown away. Sometimes it means creating something that exists only once, for the people who happen to be present. These moments remind us how small we are, and also how deeply we matter to one another.

Art and nature are our shared language. They allow us to understand complexity without reducing it, to feel truths that words alone cannot carry. They remind us that we are both less and more important than we imagine, and that we’re all writing this story together.

____________________________

Autumn Kioti Horne (they/them) is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and performer based in South Florida. Their work spans text, movement, visual art, and ecological practice, exploring how language, identity, connection, place, and material intertwine. As a poet, Kioti Horne composes through performance, listening for breath, word-sound, and the occasional stumble of language, letting these guide where lines fall on the page.

They often work with repurposed, site-responsive materials, choosing media according to how audiences can engage most fully. Grounded in storytelling, their projects draw attention to what dominant narratives overlook: small creatures, forgotten women, gender-expansive bodies, and the imperfect or uncontainable. Local ecologies and communities shape each project, allowing works to unfold through collaboration, improvisation, and attention to place.

Autumn is the co-founder of Sea Change Collective, using art as a conduit for connection, reflection and collective transformation, and is an environmental educator.