Abigail Booth
Abigail is an artist and textile craft practitioner living and working in rural Somerset. Born in London in 1991, she studied Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, the San Francisco Art Institute and Chelsea College of Art, from where she graduated in 2013. In 2014 she co-founded the studio practice Forest + Found, with her partner Max Bainbridge whom she works alongside to produce wider projects, exhibiting her work throughout the UK and internationally. Their selected exhibitions include: Idylls of the Field, Lemon Street Gallery (2022), Shallow Lands, Informality Gallery (2021/22), Biophilia, Make Hauser & Wirth Somerset (2021) Walking the Line, Ruthin Craft Centre (2018); Common Thread, New Art Centre (2020), Jerwood Makers Open, Jerwood Space (2019/20), Collect Open, Saatchi Gallery (2018). Her book The Wild Dyer was published in 2017 and in 2020 she was awarded a QEST scholarship for Painting & Textiles.
Describe your approach to teaching:
With a foundation in learning traditional skills, my teaching focuses on play and experimentation to free up a more creative way of working with textiles. I work with students to build confidence and trust in their intuition to pursue a self-guided approach to making their own work.
What inspires your work?
Working across a material language of painting, textiles and natural colour, my works delve into the internal narratives of our imagination, dreams and memory, as they originate in our interactions with nature. Reflecting on the intrinsic relationship of textiles to the human body and psychological condition I look to my painted and patchworked canvases as a site where tactile images can manifest and play with our shifting understanding of place and identity. By using pigments cultivated and unearthed from the plants and landscapes I encounter, I introduce site as both a physical and imagined space directly into the quilted surface of my works. In the very nature of their patchworked and layered construction, I question the complexity of the constructed identities of our landscapes as they are continually being remade and transformed.
