BUOYED

The closing event of Bermondsey Project Space’s 2023 LGBTQ+ History Month programme, ‘Buoyed’ was a multidisciplinary exhibition collectively curated by a group of emerging artists in its central London gallery space, examining queer bodies, identities and sexualities in the context of liquidity and fluidity. Featured alongside graphic and photographic displays, sculptural and sonic installations, paintings and films, Abigail’s contribution to the exhibition constituted an array of risograph prints inspired by fellow exhibitor Kia Matanky-Becker’s poetic ode to meandering, sticky, sapphic nights on the town ‘Cyanosis,’ and a performance of brand new work-in-progress live-art piece ‘A Session with Doctor Cushing.’

‘A Session with Doctor Cushing’ is a tale of difference and emotional distance, a melancholy yet hopeful exploration of the disconnection that can often develop between queer and/or neurodivergent people and the world of interpersonal relationships, driven by experiences of social isolation, anxiety, dysphoria and discomfort throughout one’s formative years. Abigail’s second performative examination of the character of Nancy Archer, the titular giant from cult B-movie classic ‘Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman,’ the piece mimics a scene from the film’s 1993 remake during which Nancy is being given a counselling session by her psychotherapist, Doctor Theodora Cushing, soon after the incident that led to her experiencing her supernatural growth. Whilst the two women discuss Nancy’s newfound confidence and sense of self-worth, which had previously been eroded to nothing by the belittling, chauvinistic, gaslighting behaviours of the various patriarchs in her life, throughout the scene Nancy is seen playing with a spool of heavy-duty pylon cable as though it were a stim toy, a possible direct reference to the fact that the actress playing her in this adaptation — Daryl Hannah — is an autistic woman, much like the artist, who had likely had experience of psychotherapeutic clinical settings to draw from to inform her on-camera performance. ‘A Session with Doctor Cushing’ imagines an unconventional therapy session between Nancy, played by the artist, and a plinth-top figurine representing the eponymous psychotherapist, conducted sat atop a skyscraper, a thousand feet or so above the cityscape below, at four a.m.: the only time and place she feels comfortable enough to creep from hiding and explore the (silent, empty) metropolis around her. Playing with a toy car throughout the session in the same way Daryl Hannah played with her pylon cable spool, to soothe her nerves and distract herself as she bore her soul to the doctor, Nancy discusses her fear of harming others and her extreme fawn complex in the face of interpersonal conflict; her lifelong fear of being perceived, or seen, or sensed, or spoken to by other people, as well as the comfort and understanding she has begun to derive from becoming able to interpret human behaviours in macrocosm.

Guiding Doctor Cushing through the slowly awakening cityscape as dawn approaches, Nancy describes how she has begun to find that the chaos of bodies in motion, the confusing complexity of human emotions, and the instability and passion of interpersonal relationships she struggled to comprehend as a normal-sized neurodivergent woman viewing the social world from within, has become much more coherent to her following her growth into a giantess. Suddenly able to view the city as a whole, as a singular organic corpus from high above — a vantage point from which its human residents look like nothing more than tiny blood cells ebbing and flowing through the city’s arteries and capillaries — Nancy describes the specific, predictable patterns through which the sum of humanity’s collective actions function to sustain the life and soul of their metropolitan macro-organisms.