Avril Stormy Unger is a performance and live artist with a multi sensory approach and affinity toward experience based pieces. Her practice is informed by personal experience using the body in and as a process of healing recurrent traumas. In queerness, gender, sexuality, abuse, religious oppression and pattern based behaviours intertwined with the cultural context she navigates, she is locating the language for her work. Carework, co-creation and community are crucial to her artistic practice.

Placing the queer female body in space – both in public and private, leads her to shift the gaze towards performance practice as an act of resistance. Her relationship with the audience and space is intentionally questioned and deconstructed. She seeks out unconventional settings and performative interventions in non-performative spaces in order to challenge social constructs and gender roles. Her working process is impulsive, experimental, unbound by discipline and manifests through a multidisciplinary approach.

Unger's process contains long periods of self reflection, involving conversations with affected people and an observation of patterns around engrained social concepts. Her education as a mental health professional provides an array of working tools for community focused events which she organises on regular basis. Her professional experience positions herself at the intersection of art, queerness and mental health. Her artistic alter ego 'Chutney Mary' engages with queer politics on stage and currently occupies the liminal space in between stand up and drag. 

Avril’s work is conceived on the premise that conventional and unconventional elements of existence need to be woven together in order to deliver an engaging performance. She involves audiences in a way that makes them examine life in a brutally honest, yet aesthetic manner. By exploring different forms of visual, performing and live arts, the experiential and experimental become her weapons of choice.