“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same…
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.”
— Gerald Manley Hopkins

Writer and digital creative

A smiling older white woman with short blonde hair and round glasses, wearing a blue shirt and black trousers, leaning on a desk with an old-fashioned typewriter.

Katrina Rolley is a writer and digital creative whose work centres around identity, appearance and our sense of self.

With a background in fashion and identity studies, her work combines academic rigour and research with memoir and lived experience - offering an eclectic, unexpected and accessible exploration of issues that have fascinated thinkers through the centuries and remain the focus of intense debate today.

Selving: Creating ourselves

Smiling young white woman outside wearing a colourful headwrap and bright earrings and necklace, looking directly at us. Another young white woman with spikey bleached hair is just visible behind her.

How do we become our diverse selves. Why do we fashion our bodies in the ways we do? How does our external appearance relate to our internal experience? And how do we understand and value ourselves and others?

Unanswerable questions about our embodied human existence have fascinated writers and thinkers through the centuries. Manley Hopkins’ was deeply influenced by the thirteenth century philosopher Duns Scotus, Scotus’s work was in dialogue with the ideas of Ancient Greece, and we’re still asking ourselves the same questions today.

These concerns lie at the heart of my own life’s work and my current writing weaves together memoir, academic inquiry and fictional narratives to explore our sense of self.

Fashion writing: Fashioning identities

Black and white studio photograph of two young fashionable-looking white women dressed in early 20th-century riding clothes posing confidently together. One has a skirt on and the other wears riding breeches.

As an academic writing, researching and talking about fashion, I was always interested in exploring what clothes mean to us as individuals and how we use them to create and express our sense of self.

I’ve written about the diverse realities of clothes in Edwardian England, using photographs from the National Portrait Gallery Archive. Researched the suffragettes’ relationship to fashion and femininity as part of their fight for the vote. And made a detailed study of how lesbians in Britain in the 1920s and 30s fashioned their appearances to create and expressed their identities.

These earlier academic investigations are the foundation for my current creative exploration of how we imagine, fashion and inhabit our diverse selves.

Alasdair Gray: Valuing impact

Three white Alasdair Gray drawings arranged vertically: a skull with a baby inside the brain cavity, a winged heart and clasped hands with the words A Gray Space inspired by Alasdair Gray on a distressed, dark abstract background.

I first heard the poem Pied Beauty by Gerald Manley Hopkins in 2019 when my uncle, the writer and artist Alasdair Gray, read it to me and explained the humane philosophy of Duns Scotus that inspired it.

This reading was part of a series of informal recordings we made together in the last year of his life - offering intimate insights into the work and personality of someone who was an inspirational figure to many people, including me.

Since Alasdair’s death I’ve continued to explore the value of his creative impact and legacy in a range of Gray projects and as a part of my current writing on Selving.