Kourtney Roy was born in the wilds of Northern Ontario, Canada. She was raised by a family of lumberjacks and spent her youth trapping and taming wolves.
She learned to use an axe before she learned to walk and had mastered the use of her father’s rifle and other small firearms by the age of twelve.
At the age of 13 she was the regional cross-country ski champion. She then devoted her abilities to smuggling furs and maple-syrup across the frozen Acadian frontiers.
After having spent a rather raucous youth drinking and bar fighting, she turned her gaze towards Europe, eventually settling in Paris once she was released from prison after having broken a bar stool over a man’s head in a dispute over an arm-wrestling match.
Kourtney’s days in the French capital are spent hell-raising, drinking bourbon and photographing herself in seedy hotels and dilapidated trailer parks
Kourtney Roy’s work is based on the auto-portrait. The characters she portrays are sad and dark, trapped in their mundane worlds that seem to echo from another era. The women often seem bored and pathetic in their tawdry surroundings. Roy is drawn to banal and domestic settings because she finds that the wondrous often resides in what is familiar and common. As an artist, she is fascinated with the creation of a sort of tragic mythology of the self, a personal universe where the prosaic is pervaded with the marvellous and strange.
Kickstart our month-long festival of the arts with music, photography, and community on the shores of the dazzling Bondi Beach. Be the first to know who won the 2024 Head On Photo Awards and get a taste of the photographs redefining visual storytelling.
Enthralling. Enchanting. Extraordinary. Discover exceptional photography for free around Sydney during the festival 8 Nov–1 Dec 2024
