HOTMESS is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Sophie May and Gabrielle Miller. The company creates narratives and performative art that offer audiences healthy escapism. Designed to ignite creativity, HOTMESS immerses audiences in fictional worlds using costume, sound, lighting, and storytelling. Their practice takes many forms, including immersive life-drawing shows, online courses, festival performances, gallery exhibitions, and art direction. HOTMESS was founded during the Northern NSW floods as an escape from hardship, grief, and exhaustion.

Sophie May is a Gamilaraay artist living and creating on Bundjalung Country. She works with ceramic sculpture, mixed-media painting, and runs interactive, expressive art workshops for children and adults. She is inspired by her cultural background and uses visual art as a tool for self-expression. Gabrielle Miller is a director and performer who brings ingenuity to stage and screen through music, dance, acting, puppetry, and mask. A chimerical storyteller with a wide-reaching practice, Gabrielle trained at the Atelier für Physisches Theater in Berlin and has toured worldwide with many of her self-devised shows.

HOTMESS’s work has evolved to explore political, cultural, and social conversations. Sophie integrates her heritage into devised vignettes that honour ancestry through a contemporary lens. As mothers, the artists also create pieces reflecting on contemporary motherhood and the contradictions of womanhood today. Their work has addressed global issues including displacement, climate change, and war, using intimacy, vulnerability, and embodiment to offer new perspectives and spark meaningful conversations rather than provide tidy answers.