Kay Burns is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Newfoundland, Canada. Her work incorporates audio, imagery, locative media, performance art, and installation. She has a strong interest in collaborative practices. She is a founding member of the Ministry of Walking (a collective involved in the practice of walking within individual and collaborative art explorations) and has been involved with the EMMAX collective (audio performance group).

Her work has been presented at venues internationally including Reykjavik, Amsterdam, Belfast, and Los Angeles; as well as at numerous galleries and festivals across Canada including The Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, AB; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, AB; Truck Gallery, Calgary, AB; Sound Symposium, St. John’s, NL; Struts Gallery, Sackville, NB; Odd Gallery, Dawson City, YT; and SAW Gallery, Ottawa, ON. She was a curator for 5 years at the Muttart Public Art Gallery, and she taught for 10 years through the University of Calgary Fine Arts Department and the Alberta College of Art and Design Media Arts Department. 

Much of her work is site-specific and portrays a fascination with the relationship between humanity and place, site and memory; it functions as a kind of hybrid between micro-geography and human geography addressing attributes of a particular site and human interrelationships. Often the work alludes to notions and practices of tourism; it subverts presumptions associated with the tourist experience of a given place and questions the rhetoric offered up by most regions’ tourism sectors. Her work is realized through processes of walking, investigating, collecting, documenting, and recontextualizing. Sometimes the work parodies these processes as a curatorial or archival act leading to fictional/critical interpretations of information accumulation, construction, and delivery systems. Her work is a hybrid of fact and fiction, presented in contexts that beg questions about expectations within anticipated frameworks.