THE GIANTESS SPEAKS
Formerly known as Nancy//the World
Developed with the assistance of Shape Arts and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, and with support from Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice fund.
Supported by funding from Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice grant series, and by creative mentorship from the 2022-23 edition of the Emergent programme — an annual programme organised by Gateshead’s BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and London-based disability arts organisation Shape Arts, which is aimed at supporting the UK’s most promising emerging disabled artists — since late 2023, Abigail has begun to develop an expansive multidisciplinary creative research project titled The Giantess Speaks.
Appearing throughout The Giantess Speaks’ artistic, literary, and performative outputs is an alter-ego Abigail specifically created as a creative framing device for her current research work — “Nancy.” Inspired originally by the 1993 HBO remake of 1958 B-movie Attack of the 50-ft Woman, “Nancy” reimagines the film’s titular monster Nancy Archer — a monstrous feminine figure representing the extreme repression and lack of independence afforded of neurodivergent women in a patriarchal, ableist world, portrayed in the 1993 remake by autistic actress Daryl Hannah — as a proudly queer, neurodivergent riot-grrrl giantess hellbent on destroying social, political, and environmental systems upholding misogyny, queerphobia and ableism. Through the media of live theatre, ritualistic participatory performance art, and experimental fiction, The Giantess Speaks tells the tale of a woman actively attempting to turn herself into an omnipotent giant goddess whose deviant body can fatally disrupt and destroy entire oppressive socio-political systems single-handedly. No longer needing to rely upon the deus-ex-machina of an extraterrestrial encounter to turn her into her oppressors’ worst nightmare — as Attack of the 50-ft Woman’s Nancy Archer did — this brand new re-imagining of the iconic character is able to mutate her misfit queer body into a sublime, sapphic harbinger of utopian potentialities using nothing but her own scientific genius and pure, irrepressible moxie — and have herself a lot of fun in the process…
This project significantly expands upon a short story the artist originally wrote and performed as part of a small solo art exhibition, also titled Anguish of the Fifty-Foot Woman, held in August 2021 at the ArtWorks Project Space, east London. This short story would subsequently be published as a zine which she currently sells online and in person at zine fairs and art markets across the UK. A brief summary of the original Anguish exhibition can be found in the drop-down below. If you wish to read the original short story, or purchase a copy of the riso-printed zine in which it was eventually published, you can do so by clicking the links beneath.
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Through biographical fiction, gruesomely gory folk tales, ‘Fifties B-Movie homages, installations, illustrations, costumes and a few incredibly serendipitous references to US sitcom Married with Children, Abigail Jacqueline Jones’ solo debut Anguish of the Fifty-Foot Woman takes a deep dive into Western cultural portrayals of female giants. Taking its name from the iconic 1958 Allied Artists cult classic Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman - which features Allison Hayes as its titular monster, Nancy Archer, who attempts to take revenge upon a world that stigmatised her neurodivergence and a husband who mistreated her, as she is enlarged to superhuman scale following an encounter with an alien spaceship - Anguish follows a trio of female giants attempting to eschew the shackles of a system of gendered norms that demand smallness and weakness from women, embrace their inherently gender-subversive bodies, and transform themselves into ‘monsters on their own terms’ - fighting for the liberation of ‘abnormal’ bodies and souls from the systems of oppression that bind them.
Dripping with Americana, set amongst secretive laboratories and military testing grounds in the Sierra Nevada, the first of these narratives analyses the supernaturally sized giantess as pornographic puppet of patriarchy, whose destructive power is determined solely by the imagination of the men who fetishise her, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in pathologising female largeness in the second half of the twentieth century, enforcing gender-normative smallness through prescriptions of oestrogens to stunt growth. The exhibition’s titular performance follows one scientist’s goal to bring down NO-MA’AM - the ‘National Organisation of Medics Against Amazonian Masterhood,’ a fictitious company infamous for preying on tall young girls’ insecurities, and selling them a "cure" in the form of shrinking serums - and the unexpected consequences of her methods of doing so: her accidental transformation into a skyscraper-sized giant, who despite possessing the strength to demolish whole cities in mere moments, has rather less ability than appearances suggest to demand the societal change she seeks.
Fictionalised stories centring two historical female giants constitute the remainder of the show. Drawn from tales of abuse and dehumanisation suffered by performing freaks in centuries past, and by the continued objectification of adolescent girls of extreme height today, A Monster on her Own Terms is a piece of performative storytelling inspired by Trijntje Keever, a seventeenth-century Dutch girl and life-long travelling freak-show attraction who stood eight feet, four inches tall at the time of her death at the age of seventeen. A further collection of costume, set and prop experiments for a future piece of film work, inspired by the life of nineteenth-century giant and former human exhibit at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, Anna Swan, rounds out the exhibition.
The photographs and promotional images below are from the original Anguish of the Fifty-Foot Woman exhibition, August 2021.
MADAME SWAN
Produced in partnership with Shape Arts and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
“Nineteen-year-old Anna Swan, the Giantess of the Great North: who was she? Biological anomaly? Genetic mutant? Diabolical cross-breed of mammoth and man?
Titanic threat to the hierarchy of man above woman, perhaps? Harbinger of things to come. A Horsewoman of Patriarchy’s apocalypse, pre-empting the rise of a race of women giants that might finally put the men in their rightful place?
Or conversely, maybe she’s the ultimate male conquest. Venus manifest. A mountainous goddess to be climbed, to be claimed, to be sucked, to be fucked.
Or maybe she’s just a girl who wants to go home...”
‘Madame Swan’ is an ongoing, long-term creative endeavour, consisting of an unconventionally open, interactive research and development programme incorporating live performance and visual art exhibitions, site-specific events, communal and collaborative workshops, and DIY publications, which will culminate in the creation of a full-length theatrical production. It is a tribute to all those who have ever occupied a body incompatible with the world around them. It is a celebration of non-normative and gender-subversive anatomies, minds and mentalities, in the face of violently enforced, nonsensical social binaries and hierarchies. It is a dramatic exploration, through historical fiction and sick, twisted fantasy, of feminism and fetishism according to the freak; of the fallacy of oppositional sexism - the notion that all humans must be categorised according to a strict, genital-centric binary, in which the classifications of ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ are envisioned as polar opposites exhibiting mutually exclusive traits - and of the intersectional, disabling discriminations experienced by queer, gender ambiguous, neurodivergent or physiologically non-normative individuals: those whom cannot navigate artificial social structures and built environments as they presently exist, constructed by and for the benefit of dominant groups either ignorant of, or maliciously denying, their needs from the world around them. Above all else, however, ‘Madame Swan’ is a radical reclamation of the title of ‘Monster,’ an almost universally derogatory term hurled at those whose minds, bodies and soul dare to defy convention - whether by conscious intention, birth or twist of fate - as a term of endearment, defiance and pride in the face of dehumanisation and prejudice.
‘Madame Swan’ was initially conceived during the first pandemic lockdown in April 2020. Inspired by the life of Anna Swan - the 7’11” tall, Victorian-era human exhibit and touring sideshow performer after whom the project was named - ‘Madame Swan’ was 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. Initial proof-of-concept experiments for the project involved the artist modifying her body, through the use of costume and prosthetics, in order to transform her body into something that replicated the almost eight-foot tall Anna’s form as closely as possible, in order to revive and reanimate her memory, and get a sense of what life would have been like in her shoes. Teaming up with textile artist Zoe Sanders, Abigail designed and fabricated ‘Anna Swan’s Skirt’ - a 5’8” high, fully wearable double-skirt and crinoline cage modelled on garments that would have been fashionable in the early 1860s, during the real Anna Swan’s young adult life - over the course of June 2021, images from the creation of which are displayed below. Utilising this carefully tailored costume piece, Abigail conducted a photoshoot in character as ‘Anna’ (seen below) in time for exhibition at her solo art show, ‘Anguish of the Fifty-Foot Woman,’ an account of which can be found further down this page.
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Anna Swan’s Skirt is a 175cm high mid-Victorian-style double-skirt and crinoline, created both for display during ‘Anguish of the Fifty-Foot Woman,’ and as a functioning costume for future performances and film shoots produced as part of the artist’s ongoing ‘Madame Swan’ project, inspired by the life of the titular nineteenth-century female giant and travelling human exhibit. Its design dapted from sewing patterns created by historical costumiers and fashion enthusiasts ‘Truly Victorian,’ for a skirt and crinoline barely more than half the size of Anna’s, Anna Swan’s Skirt was the product of a collaboration between Abigail and her close friend Zoe Sanders, a fellow recent Goldsmiths graduate and textile artist with whom she shares a studio space in the Isle of Dogs. The crinoline cage, created first, is formed of a calico bag of 570cm circumference, around which four rings of metal corset boning run, hung from a waistband and six further rings of corset boning by a series of jacquard and grosgrain ribbon verticals. The skirt itself is made from two layers of black satin placed one on top of the other and sewn, pleated, into a single waistband.
The entire costume was created within the space of four days, with the skirt itself being completed in one. With the assistance of Alice Watkins, another artist, friend and recent graduate, the artist conducted a photoshoot wearing Anna’s skirt a fortnight or so prior to ‘Anguish of the Fifty-Foot Woman’s opening. In the photograph at the head of this page, the artist can be seen wearing the skirt in the Arnold Circus Gardens, in Shoreditch, and in some of the images below she is pictured in costume outside Wilton’s Music Hall, near Aldgate. Four photographs were printed and displayed, large-scale, at ‘Anguish,’ and the skirt itself was hung from the ceiling by way of hooks, string, and a temporary waistband formed from a wooden ring salvaged from the structure of a hat-stand found in the artist’s studio, which would allow the crinoline to keep its shape whilst not being physically worn.
BUOYED
Bermondsey Project Space, London | February 2023
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.
HOO HAH HOUSE COLLABORATIONS
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The images above are stills from a staged performance of self-penned short story, ‘Show Me Your Genitals, Baby!’ at the London Hospital Tavern, Whitechapel, in November 2021. One of nine acts selected by Hoo Hah House to accompany performances of Everleigh’s one-woman play, ‘Brave Face,’ during its four-night run - its debut run in London, following a successful series of performances at that past summer’s Edinburgh Fringe - I took to the stage to perform a revived, re-edited version of the last piece I performed on a cabaret stage pre-COVID: a piece of self-penned storytelling called ‘Show Me Your Genitals, Baby!’
'Show Me Your Genitals, Baby!' tells the story of one insufferably progressive, painfully white middle-class new mother's unwavering insistence upon raising her newborn child gender-neutral, no matter what pressures might stand in the way of her doing so. Even if those 'pressures' happen to take the form of an omnipotent, vengeful, Luciferian gatekeeper of binary, sex-based gender going by the name of 'The Assigner,' raising an unholy army of demonic dolls, action figures, and other once-inanimate, pointlessly gendered toys and childhood ephemera, to march upon her desirable little three-bed terrace in a 'quirky,' newly gentrified neighbourhood in south-east London, reduce it to smouldering rubble in a storm of hellfire, and remove the child from its sinful guardians, to be 'assigned' its rightful gender based upon the only definitive factor that truly matters: the organ that happens to be lurking beneath the thick cotton of its nappy.
White, middle-class liberals will do anything for a bit of progressive social clout, won't they...
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In 2022, Abigail entered into a long-term collaboration to create and publish a series of zines, posters and illustrated books based upon productions created, developed or produced by Hoo Hah House. The first product of this collaboration - a short, Risograph-printed zine containing the manuscript to Artistic Director Everleigh Brenner’s own one-person play, ‘BRAVE FACE,’ alongside brief introductions to the company, to its two founders, to the play itself, and to the artist behind the zine - is pictured above, alongside a trio of poster designs based upon a scene from the beginning of the show.
Over the next twelve months, Abigail will work alongside the company to produce a series of posters and a manuscript publication accompanying ‘Flumps’ - a play by Emma Pallett, produced by Hoo Hah House - alongside some more elaborate publications and visual artwork based on ‘BRAVE FACE,’ upon her own future writing collaboration with Everleigh, and upon a few other elaborate performance projects the company currently has in the pipeline.
FRONT ROOM SPECTACULAR
Between August 2019 and October 2022, Abigail was a regular performer at scratch performance night Front Room Spectacular, hosted by fellow performer and close friend Candle Hirst at Deptford’s Matchstick Piehouse. Most of her performances at Front Room featured heavy emphasis on storytelling and theatricality with the most basic of resources available, given the lo-fi, experimental nature of the event. A list of performances she has given during editions of ‘Front Room Spectacular’ can be found below, along with links to manuscripts from these performances, featuring a few images and recordings where available.
“You know, all I said is that I wanted to raise my child gender neutral. I didn’t think that was such a big ask. Don’t drown my baby in an overwhelming ocean of odious pink projectile vomit just because some quack at the ultrasound clinic’s picked out the puniest traces of a pre-natal pussy in amongst the sludge of random body-parts swimming round Mummy’s uterus. And you know what? Don’t let’s have everyone in the whole world make out that my baby’s flirting or being a ladies’ man the second he gets anywhere near a girl at daycare, as though they might actually welcome it transforming into a sex-crazed, bar-crawling creep the second its bollocks drop. But oh, fucking no, you couldn’t have that now, could you...”
‘Show Me Your Genitals, Baby!’
““Sir,” the assistant would say, firmly, but with a proper smirk on his face, anticipating his inevitable red-faced reaction, “are you actually looking to buy something today, or are you just taking the piss?”
The American poseur would glance up from the table. Suddenly all nervous, sweaty, shaky, constrained in his clothes, trying his hardest not to let this big-shot, Mister Moneybags persona of his falter, he’d start to stutter out the phrase with which he’d excuse himself. You would think each of them would at least be able to come up with a new, imaginative, individual excuse every time the assistants cornered them and clobbered them for messing up our showrooms, just to satisfy their need to feel a titan for once in their sorry little lives; but peculiarly enough, whenever they did challenge one of these pretenders to cough up the money to actually purchase one of their bespoke garments, they always, without exception, choked out the self-same phrase as they backed themselves towards the exit, ready to run as hard as they could from Savile Row and never come back as soon as the door shut behind them.
”Listen, sir - my wife’s just in Swan and Edgar...””
‘Swan & Edgar’
“A decent amount of time has passed since I made that wish upon that Godforsaken Christmas star. And, now, with every single millisecond of time that’s passed since that midnight hour of begging on my knees beneath the tree, it’s become exponentially more evident how much my innocent childhood naivete, to think it could ever possibly work to celebrate Christmas every single day of every single year, has utterly fucked us! Fucked the country! Fucked the entire fucking globe from corner to fucking corner!”
‘The Eternal Christmas’
“I remember the sign above the entrance to the caravan. ‘The Most Mesmeric Collection of Freaks in All the Netherlands.’
I remember watching the silhouette of my father scribble his signature upon the contract through the caravan’s lace curtain, as I stood without. Watched him shake a menacing, meaty hand from across the desk.
I remember my mother’s melancholy lip quivering as she stepped outside, struggling to keep herself from crumbling into pools of tears – my father pale as a sheet, weak, trying his hardest to keep a stiff upper lip as the man from the freak show followed the two of them out, a slick, wicked grin unravelled the full breadth of his face. They did not know if they could ever reconcile themselves with what they’d done...”
‘A Monster on her Own Terms’
NO BOUNDS RADIO
Founded in March 2020, at the start of a nationwide quarantine caused by the outbreak of COVID-19, No Bounds Radio is a small, independent, literature-themed radio station, featuring readings of and discussions about an enormous variety of literary topics, hosted by a number of dedicated enthusiasts of poetry, prose and spoken-word alike. Since Friday 10th April, I have maintained a weekly hour-long slot on the station, performing an array of different readings both of my own work and of the written pieces that have inspired my own work throughout the years, and discussions on topics including children’s author Jacqueline Wilson’s early career as a crime thriller novelist, and the portrayal of real and fictitious giant women in popular culture and media. Every episode I have recorded thus far is posted below, as are a variety of accompanying clips and readings that did not make the cut for the live broadcast.
In which I discuss the portrayal of tall women in contemporary culture through the lens of oppositional sexism and the notion of the othered body; the similarities between transgender and intersex bodies, and cisgender bodies that intrinsically subvert general societal expectations of what a binary man or woman should look like, in terms of suffering variations of gender-based dysphoria for failing to fully fit in to the confines of either binary sex; and the distressing difficulties tall women face in everyday life - in terms of seeking community and body positivity, and in terms of their constant portrayal as fetish objects, freak-show attractions and monsters. Features readings from ‘Whipping Girl,’ by Julia Serano, ‘Monster,’ by Aly Stosz, and my own short story, ‘A Monster on Her Own Terms.’
In which I take a look at children’s author Jacqueline Wilson’s career as a crime novelist during the 1970s, and join the dots between her sympathetic psychological analysis of the criminal antagonist of her debut novel - ‘Hide and Seek,’ published in 1972 - and her portrayals of troubled childhood in the children’s books for which she has since become famous. Featuring mixed-in music by Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Thomas Dolby, Keisha White and Toyah.
Featuring readings of Syrian folk tale ‘The Woodcutter’s Wealthy Sister’, ‘Sahin,’ from Palestine, ‘The Orphan,’ from Malawi, and Inuit folk tale ‘Old Age.’ Additionally features brief introductory piece discussing the fairy tale as communally shaped, continuously evolutionary cultural form, as opposed to pieces of literature whose forms are determined and dictated by a singular author, and mixed-in music from Princess Chelsea, Monsoon and Angelique Kidjo.