is an autistic, transfemme multidisciplinary visual artist, performer and writer, and an academic researcher with a particular and overzealous interest in unconventional human sexualities.

Engaged in highly avant-garde, experimental, queer and transgressive forms of creative research, tangentially intersecting with the institutional academic establishment only where absolutely necessary, her practice twins live disciplines — such as cabaret, immersive theatre, and spoken-word — with the creation of DIY self-published artist’s books and zines, as well as the recording, archiving and dissemination of oral histories, ethnographies, and qualitative sociological research. Informed by her own experiences of highly intense stigma, shame and trauma surrounding gender, neurodivergence, divergent sexuality and kink, Abigail’s current practice seeks to dramatically expand our collective understanding of the divergent erotic imagination and its potential to serve as a conduit through which marginalised queer, female, disabled, and neurodivergent folks explore their relationships with their bodies and brains, and cope with living in a world that is hostile to their existence.

With the support of a number of major UK-based arts organisations including Shape Arts, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Arts Council England, throughout 2023 Abigail has begun to embark on a long-term creative and academic research project titled The Giantess Speaks. Alongside producing an original body of academic research and an extensive oral history archive as a result of this project, described in detail below, The Giantess Speaks will see Abigail produce collections of original written fiction, live performances, visual art, and photography. In 2024, Abigail was invited to present her preliminary research work at the Center for Positive Sexuality’s 2024 Sexuality Scholars’ Symposium, to audiences of critical sexuality scholars from across the world. This follows her successful completion of a Fellowship in Human Sexuality research with the California Institute of Integral Studies, working alongside researchers from UC San Francisco, Georgia State University, Stonybrook University, and University College London, to produce groundbreaking new research surrounding advocacy and peer-support networks amongst sex worker communities.

Over the past two years, Abigail has also begun to sell zines and poster prints produced from her own risograph studio — ‘The Fifty-Foot Press’ — both online and at events across the UK, including Glasgow Zine Fest, Tate Britain’s Queer & Now, Grrrl Zine Fair, and Margate Zine Fair. Alongside selling art prints and zines to raise money for her academic and performance practices, Abigail is able to offer open-access print sessions from her back-garden studio, through which her fellow writers, artists and zine-makers can come to print and publish their own work at an affordable rate.

Artist’s Biography

Research Conversations

Live Art & Performances

Read The SCRREW Manifesto

The Giantess Speaks aside, Abigail has embarked upon several smaller-scale, but no less ambitious, performance projects throughout her career. These projects have incorporated a range of different disciplines — including immersive live art, site-specific communal performance interventions, theatrical storytelling, cabaret sets and spoken-word — and have encompassed a variety of different subject matters. Subjects of past works have included the historical and contemporary discrimination of disabled, queer and gender-subversive bodies; the British conservative elite’s deeply prejudiced attitudes surrounding race, sex, class, and the nation’s histories of imperialism and subjugation; and cisgender society’s transphobic antagonism towards male-to-female transition, in particular its inability to comprehend the motivations transgender women may have for socially or medically transitioning through anything other than through a deeply cis-sexist, patriarchal lens. 

Live Art & Exhibitions

Short Stories & Research Archive

The Fifty-Foot Press is Abigail’s DIY publishing imprint and risograph studio. With the help of a second-hand riso duplicator, since early 2023 she has been producing zines and risograph prints from a small studio in her back garden, which she distributes and sells via an online shop on this very website, and at zine fairs and independent art markets across the UK.

Alongside printing and distributing her own work, Abigail has also produced zines featuring the written work of some of her previous collaborators, and has also facilitated open-access printing sessions on behalf of other artists. If you are interested in printing your own work at her studio, click here for further information.

The Fifty-Foot Press

 ILLUSTRATIONS

Every so often, when she isn’t working on a new performance piece, or producing zines or prints on the risograph, Abigail will produce the odd pen-and-ink illustration, digital poster or hand-drawn map. A few such illustrations and posters can be seen in her online shop, and can be viewed in the gallery below.

One such piece — …Not to Mention Napier — was a prize-winner at the 2020 ArtWorks Open, hosted by the Barbican Arts Group Trust. Detailed images of this piece, for which the artist was awarded a cash prize of £500 and the opportunity to curate her own solo exhibition, can be viewed in the banner slideshow above; similarly, an image showing the piece in its entirety can be viewed in the gallery below.

Illustrations and Zines

THE STRANGERS’ GUIDE

is a small series of hand-drawn maps Abigail began producing over the winter lockdown of 2021. The Strangers’ Guide details the street plan of central London from South Kensington to Aldgate and King’s Cross to Kennington, and features over 200 pinpointed landmarks. A timeline of the city’s history and a brief guide to certain local neighbourhoods can be found on the reverse of the folded version of the Guide, available to purchase through Abigail’s online shop. A white-on-black version of the map, giclee printed to A1 scale on archival-quality 300gsm Hahnemühle Pearl paper, can also be purchased from the same store.