THE GIANTESS SPEAKS

Supported by Battersea Arts Centre, Pleasance Theatre, and Arts Council England, and developed with the assistance of Gateshead’s BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and London-based disability arts organisation Shape Arts, since late 2023, Abigail has developed an expansive multidisciplinary creative research project titled The Giantess Speaks.

BUOYED | Bermondsey Project Space - Feb 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.’

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.

ANGUISH OF THE FIFTY-FOOT WOMAN | ArtWorks Project Space, Aug 2021

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, 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.

HOO HAH HOUSE SHOWS

FRONT ROOM SPECTACULAR

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.

THE WORST FATE A MAN COULD EVER SUFFER

Photograph of the Artist, in costume as Joan Carpenter, courtesy Adrian Pope.

Performance (45 mins) and immersive set Installation, including nine pen-and-ink illustrations (70x100cm) by the Artist, and scavenged props. Produced for the Goldsmiths BA FA Degree Show, 2019.

THE JOAN CARPENTER CLUB'S FIRST INTERVENTION | THE EAST INDIA CLUB

Group photograph of participants at the Joan Carpenter Club’s first event - a three-and-a-half hour long secret, unauthorised intervention, involving collaborative performance, role-playing and the creation of some rather cutting satirical caricatures, at the West End’s East India Club.

Photograph courtesy Tara White.

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.

live art & exhibitions archive