Mia Roberts

I use performance, mixed media and technological research to investigate how infrastructure and social systems enforce rigid forms of relation. 

Using hypocrisy, satire and bathos, I try to build worlds that foreground the forgotten quotidian. The inner workings of small towns, rural internet culture, corporate jobs and service work are central in this process, moving focus from contemporary culture to the perceived periphery. Through positioning the experiences of the forgotten in rural society, I hope find ways we can restructure our relationships to one another.

I tend to engage with failure as a creative process, reappropriating repression in personas that confront personal histories navigating trans identity, addiction and homelessness whilst growing up along the coast of North Wales. This often takes the form of performative masculinity and repetitive absurd actions. Juxtaposing failure and arbitrary success metrics become attempts to highlight the futility of continuing to embody a structural attitude that is antithetical to healing.

My hope is that by highlighting the underlying labour forms that that allow society to function, questions can be asked about how we navigate a world defined by metrics encoded in the professional workplace, such as "efficiency", "targets" and “productivity”.

My practice has been informed by time spent navigating alcoholism and addiction whilst growing up on the North Wales Coast. The lived experience of sleeping rough and struggling to come to terms with gender incongruence, and navigating precarious sex work to survive informs gendered material exploration and tensions through material .