Autumn Kioti Horne (they/them) is a South Florida–based poet, interdisciplinary artist, and performer whose practice moves across installation, visual art, poetry, performance, movement, sound, fiber, video, and ecological engagement. Working responsively with place, Horne allows materials, weather, chance, and the particular character of a site to shape the work. Their practice is rooted in storytelling and local ecologies, exploring the threads that connect people to place, memory to landscape, and the discarded to the revered.
Kioti Horne’s work is drawn toward what has been overlooked or lost: small creatures, forgotten women, gender-expansive bodies, half-remembered myths, and forms that resist containment. Working with found, discarded, repurposed, and site-responsive materials, they are interested in the stories objects carry and the systems they reveal; consumption, labor, migration, extraction, privilege, care, and waste. This material inquiry extends into their engagement with climate change, ecofeminism, identity, undoing harm, and the urgent need for green and wild spaces.
An ongoing series of human-animal hybrids brings unconventional cyanotype processes together with Mylar, discarded textiles, shipping mailers, wallpaper, cardboard, thread, ink, gouache, and found matter. Rainwater and seawater, along with plants, soil, sunlight, and materials gathered from the immediate surroundings, become collaborators in the printing process. Often mounted alone on plexiglass or directly onto the wall, the creatures meet the viewer’s gaze. Their isolation allows the architecture, light, and atmosphere of a site to enter the work, transforming each creature into a small mythology and the exhibition space into part of its story.
Their poetry emerges through a similar attention to place, rhythm, and the physicality of language. They compose aloud, listening for breath, sound, silence, and the stumble of language, allowing these rhythms to shape the movement and spatial arrangement of words. Across their interdisciplinary practice, Kioti Horne follows curiosity rather than a predetermined medium, allowing each project to find its own form through collaboration, improvisation, and close attention to environment.
This practice has been supported by residencies, grants, and institutions including Santa Fe Art Institute, NYC Audubon, Art Monastery Italia, Cill Rialaig Artist Retreat, Last Frontier NYC, The Mothership Brooklyn, NOoSphere Arts, NMSA, and Cultural Council for Palm Beach, among others. Their site-responsive performances have been commissioned and presented by museums, galleries, public art programs, and unconventional spaces.
Kioti Horne’s poetry appears in Danielle McKinney: Shelter, published by Greg R. Miller & Co. Their installation The Necessary Monster and the Sea Itself is on view November 5, 2026–January 2027 in the Main Gallery at the Cultural Council for Palm Beach, with a companion performance presented in December 2026.
They are the founder of Sea Change Collective, a performance art project created with Suzanne Ankrum that uses art as a conduit for connection, reflection, and collective transformation. Across their work, Kioti Horne approaches art as an offering and a form of communion; between artist and viewer, human and more-than-human, the immediate world and the older stories beneath it.
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Art and nature are our shared languages. They give us ways of approaching complexity without reducing it, and ways of feeling truths that language alone cannot carry. I make art to create that connection, between people and the earth, between the visible and invisible forces that shape our lives, between us.
My practice begins by taking a flying leap and building my wings on the way down. It's the only way I know how to exist as an artist. And what happens after that? The discoveries, the missteps, the beautiful accidents, the failures that turn out to be another kind of knowledge. Even when it works, you know...
We're all sometimes Icarus.
I work across installation, visual art, poetry, performance, movement, sound, fiber, video, found materials, and environmental engagement. I don't think of these as separate disciplines so much as different ways of speaking. I let the work choose its language. What interests me are the threads between people and place, memory and landscape, between the discarded and the treasured, the stories we inherit and the ones that have been lost. I am always trying to offer a new old story.
By illuminating the threads that tie us to a place, its particular sun and water, its textures, its histories, and to the deep mythologies and folktales that have lived in the soil of the Earth longer than any of us, I am looking for the moment when the immediate world opens onto something older and stranger. When a piece of debris becomes evidence, a creature becomes a witness, a patch of sunlight becomes an archive.
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, forgotten, 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 or uncontainable. I am interested in the residue they leave behind; waves of resonance that continue to lap at the shores of our collective unconscious, even after the tide has long ebbed.
Because my practice is responsive, I let place and material lead. I walk, listen, look at what is underfoot, pay attention to a wetland, a neighborhood, a vacant lot, a shoreline, noticing the light, the debris, the plants growing where they weren't supposed to, the marks left by weather, the things people leave behind.
Then I begin, working with what is already there; not because I believe every material needs to be preserved, but because discarded things complicate our ideas about value.
These things carry stories. They carry evidence of consumption, labor, migration, extraction, privilege, care, and waste. They contain the traces of systems much larger than themselves. When I bring them into the work, I am interested in what happens when something considered disposable is asked to hold our attention.
This use of discarded materials comes partly from growing up self-taught and learning to make do with what was available. But it is also a form of environmental inquiry. I am interested in what we overlook, what we refuse to care for, and the ways our definitions of value shape the world around us. This leads me toward climate change, ecofeminism, identity, undoing harm, and our urgent need for green and wild spaces.
I am interested in the ecosystems inside us and outside us, and in the places where those two worlds become impossible to separate.
Water is one of my collaborators. Rain and seawater enter my cyanotype processes. Plants, soil, sunlight, and materials gathered from the immediate surroundings become part of the image. I allow weather and chance to leave their marks. The result is never entirely mine. That matters to me.
An ongoing series of human-animal hybrids has grown from this way of working. I make these creatures from unconventional cyanotype processes, Mylar, discarded textiles, shipping mailers, wallpaper, cardboard, thread, ink, gouache, and found matter. They are part animal, part human, part landscape, part memory. Often mounted alone on plexiglass or directly onto a wall, they meet the viewer's gaze. I want that encounter to feel intimate.
Placed alone, the creature becomes inseparable from the architecture around it. The wall, the light, the distance between bodies, the sounds beyond the room; all of it enters the work. The site becomes part of a mythology. Details small enough to overlook, strange enough to make us pause, carrying a story much larger than themselves.
My poetry moves through this same territory. I compose aloud, listening for breath, rhythm, silence, and the stumble of language. I am interested in what happens when words become physical, when they leave the page and occupy a body, a room, a performance, a pause, making room for recognition, mystery, and the possibility that something can be understood without being completely named.
I want to blur the line between absurdity and reverence, proving the ridiculous can be sacred. Sometimes that means elevating an object that was thrown away. Sometimes it means giving a forgotten figure back their story. Sometimes it means making something that exists only once, for the people who happen to be present. Sometimes it means making a creature that looks back.
And sometimes it means being silly. There is room for all of it.
I am interested in that threshold; the place where a thing stops being merely itself and begins to point toward something else.
Perhaps that is what I am ultimately trying to do: to make space for what has been overlooked, to listen for what is still speaking beneath the surface.
To remind us that we are both less and more important than we imagine, and that we're all writing this story together.
Kioti Horne’s work is drawn toward what has been overlooked or lost: small creatures, forgotten women, gender-expansive bodies, half-remembered myths, and forms that resist containment. Working with found, discarded, repurposed, and site-responsive materials, they are interested in the stories objects carry and the systems they reveal; consumption, labor, migration, extraction, privilege, care, and waste. This material inquiry extends into their engagement with climate change, ecofeminism, identity, undoing harm, and the urgent need for green and wild spaces.
An ongoing series of human-animal hybrids brings unconventional cyanotype processes together with Mylar, discarded textiles, shipping mailers, wallpaper, cardboard, thread, ink, gouache, and found matter. Rainwater and seawater, along with plants, soil, sunlight, and materials gathered from the immediate surroundings, become collaborators in the printing process. Often mounted alone on plexiglass or directly onto the wall, the creatures meet the viewer’s gaze. Their isolation allows the architecture, light, and atmosphere of a site to enter the work, transforming each creature into a small mythology and the exhibition space into part of its story.
Their poetry emerges through a similar attention to place, rhythm, and the physicality of language. They compose aloud, listening for breath, sound, silence, and the stumble of language, allowing these rhythms to shape the movement and spatial arrangement of words. Across their interdisciplinary practice, Kioti Horne follows curiosity rather than a predetermined medium, allowing each project to find its own form through collaboration, improvisation, and close attention to environment.
This practice has been supported by residencies, grants, and institutions including Santa Fe Art Institute, NYC Audubon, Art Monastery Italia, Cill Rialaig Artist Retreat, Last Frontier NYC, The Mothership Brooklyn, NOoSphere Arts, NMSA, and Cultural Council for Palm Beach, among others. Their site-responsive performances have been commissioned and presented by museums, galleries, public art programs, and unconventional spaces.
Kioti Horne’s poetry appears in Danielle McKinney: Shelter, published by Greg R. Miller & Co. Their installation The Necessary Monster and the Sea Itself is on view November 5, 2026–January 2027 in the Main Gallery at the Cultural Council for Palm Beach, with a companion performance presented in December 2026.
They are the founder of Sea Change Collective, a performance art project created with Suzanne Ankrum that uses art as a conduit for connection, reflection, and collective transformation. Across their work, Kioti Horne approaches art as an offering and a form of communion; between artist and viewer, human and more-than-human, the immediate world and the older stories beneath it.
__________________________________________________________________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _
Art and nature are our shared languages. They give us ways of approaching complexity without reducing it, and ways of feeling truths that language alone cannot carry. I make art to create that connection, between people and the earth, between the visible and invisible forces that shape our lives, between us.
My practice begins by taking a flying leap and building my wings on the way down. It's the only way I know how to exist as an artist. And what happens after that? The discoveries, the missteps, the beautiful accidents, the failures that turn out to be another kind of knowledge. Even when it works, you know...
We're all sometimes Icarus.
I work across installation, visual art, poetry, performance, movement, sound, fiber, video, found materials, and environmental engagement. I don't think of these as separate disciplines so much as different ways of speaking. I let the work choose its language. What interests me are the threads between people and place, memory and landscape, between the discarded and the treasured, the stories we inherit and the ones that have been lost. I am always trying to offer a new old story.
By illuminating the threads that tie us to a place, its particular sun and water, its textures, its histories, and to the deep mythologies and folktales that have lived in the soil of the Earth longer than any of us, I am looking for the moment when the immediate world opens onto something older and stranger. When a piece of debris becomes evidence, a creature becomes a witness, a patch of sunlight becomes an archive.
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, forgotten, 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 or uncontainable. I am interested in the residue they leave behind; waves of resonance that continue to lap at the shores of our collective unconscious, even after the tide has long ebbed.
Because my practice is responsive, I let place and material lead. I walk, listen, look at what is underfoot, pay attention to a wetland, a neighborhood, a vacant lot, a shoreline, noticing the light, the debris, the plants growing where they weren't supposed to, the marks left by weather, the things people leave behind.
Then I begin, working with what is already there; not because I believe every material needs to be preserved, but because discarded things complicate our ideas about value.
These things carry stories. They carry evidence of consumption, labor, migration, extraction, privilege, care, and waste. They contain the traces of systems much larger than themselves. When I bring them into the work, I am interested in what happens when something considered disposable is asked to hold our attention.
This use of discarded materials comes partly from growing up self-taught and learning to make do with what was available. But it is also a form of environmental inquiry. I am interested in what we overlook, what we refuse to care for, and the ways our definitions of value shape the world around us. This leads me toward climate change, ecofeminism, identity, undoing harm, and our urgent need for green and wild spaces.
I am interested in the ecosystems inside us and outside us, and in the places where those two worlds become impossible to separate.
Water is one of my collaborators. Rain and seawater enter my cyanotype processes. Plants, soil, sunlight, and materials gathered from the immediate surroundings become part of the image. I allow weather and chance to leave their marks. The result is never entirely mine. That matters to me.
An ongoing series of human-animal hybrids has grown from this way of working. I make these creatures from unconventional cyanotype processes, Mylar, discarded textiles, shipping mailers, wallpaper, cardboard, thread, ink, gouache, and found matter. They are part animal, part human, part landscape, part memory. Often mounted alone on plexiglass or directly onto a wall, they meet the viewer's gaze. I want that encounter to feel intimate.
Placed alone, the creature becomes inseparable from the architecture around it. The wall, the light, the distance between bodies, the sounds beyond the room; all of it enters the work. The site becomes part of a mythology. Details small enough to overlook, strange enough to make us pause, carrying a story much larger than themselves.
My poetry moves through this same territory. I compose aloud, listening for breath, rhythm, silence, and the stumble of language. I am interested in what happens when words become physical, when they leave the page and occupy a body, a room, a performance, a pause, making room for recognition, mystery, and the possibility that something can be understood without being completely named.
I want to blur the line between absurdity and reverence, proving the ridiculous can be sacred. Sometimes that means elevating an object that was thrown away. Sometimes it means giving a forgotten figure back their story. Sometimes it means making something that exists only once, for the people who happen to be present. Sometimes it means making a creature that looks back.
And sometimes it means being silly. There is room for all of it.
I am interested in that threshold; the place where a thing stops being merely itself and begins to point toward something else.
Perhaps that is what I am ultimately trying to do: to make space for what has been overlooked, to listen for what is still speaking beneath the surface.
To remind us that we are both less and more important than we imagine, and that we're all writing this story together.
© Autumn Kioti 2017
all content sole property of the artist; no content may be reproduced without artist's express permission
all content sole property of the artist; no content may be reproduced without artist's express permission