About + Contact
Bio
Abi Palmer is an artist, writer and filmmaker. She uses film, text, sculpture and sensory intervention to explore sick bodies, viscous textures and ecological landscapes.
She is the author of Slugs: A Manifesto (Makina Books, 2024) and Sanatorium - a fragmented memoir that jumps between a luxury thermal pool and a blue inflatable bathtub (Penned in the Margins 2020). Artworks include mixed-media solo exhibition Slime Mother (Chapter, Cardiff, 2024); film series Abi Palmer Invents the Weather (Artangel 2023); and interactive gambling arcade Crip Casino (Tate Modern, Somerset House, Wellcome Collection, Collective Edinburgh).
Abi’s copulating slug sculptures were included in the 2023 Frieze Corridor Commission. Her films were included in Crip Arte Spazio at La Biennale di Venezia 2024, the first major international exhibition of the UK Disability Arts Movement. She is a Bloomberg New Contemporary Artist (2023); a recipient of Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s ‘Awards for Artists (2021) and Artangel’s ‘Thinking Time’ award (2020). Sanatorium was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.
Collaboration
A key aspect of Abi’s work is collaboration: forming conversations between performer and participant, movement and language, and across a wide range of different disciplines. Abi's work has explored Philosophy of Science, Marine Biology, Contemporary Dance and Mineralogy. In 2016, she collaborated with mycologist and poet Nathan Smith to develop a series of new literary forms, 'Mycolyrica' based on the growing structures of fungi. In 2013, she worked with her brother, artist Ollie Palmer, to develop ‘Nybble:’ an installation that transformed contemporary dancers into a human computer, at the V&A Museum, London.
In 2015, Abi co-founded The SHINDIG Collective with curator Wesley Freeman-Smith, a year-long project to develop risk-taking conversations between a team of scientists, artists, dancers, film makers, poets and musicians. Experimental salons and participatory scratch nights followed, including the geometrically-influenced 'Dancing in Code', and immersive ‘choose-your-own-narrative’ event Tall Tales Labyrinth. The cut-up zine 'SHINPRINT #1' serves as a DIY manifesto for the project, celebrating influences from Dada, Fluxus and Oulipo movements in developing absurd, playful conversation between performer and participant.
