Initially conceived during the first COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020, Anna Swan’s Skirt marked Abigail’s first attempt to explore themes surrounding social and cultural attitudes to queerness, disability, anatomical non-normativity, and the gender-subversive body, through the lens of the female giant.
Anna Swan’s Skirt is a 5’8” high, fully wearable double-skirt and crinoline cage, which Abigail designed and co-fabricated with textile artist, fellow Goldsmiths graduate, and close friend Zoe Sanders in June 2021. Modelled on garment designs and patterns fashionable during the mid-nineteenth century, and designed to be worn by the artist whilst wearing and walking in a pair of eighteen-inch plasterer’s stilts, Abigail’s intentions in producing Anna Swan’s Skirt were to effectively adopt the body size and shape of the Victorian-era giant Anna Swan, who, beginning in her mid-teens, was exhibited across the eastern United States and Western Europe as a human curiosity under the management of figures such as P.T. Barnum. Standing, according to various sources, between 7’6” and 7’11” at full height, throughout her life Anna’s body was greatly incompatible with the scale of the built environment around her, which led to her and her husband — fellow giant and human exhibit Martin van Buren Bates — constructing a house specifically built with the dimensions of their bodies in mind; furthermore, the scale of Anna’s body dramatically subverted nineteenth-century Western cultural expectations of feminine smallness and slightness, for all Anna consistently attempted to portray herself as the model of a cultured, educated modern woman.
Photographs taken during the fabrication of Anna Swan’s Skirt, and during a photoshoot conducted with artist and photographer Alice Watkins following its completion, can be seen below. A selection of the images below were exhibited during Abigail’s August 2021 solo art exhibition Anguish of the Fifty-Foot Woman.
