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.
ANNA SWAN’S SKIRT
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.
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 SHOWS
FRONT ROOM SPECTACULAR
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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...
Between August 2019 and October 2022, Abigail was a regular performer at scratch performance night Front Room Spectacular, hosted by fellow performer Candle Hirst in south-east London. 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.
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.