Overview
Overview
Abigail Conway is an artist who works in the realm of live performance creating both intimate and large scale installations. Abigail's interests lie in working with material objects, craft and actions to create playful site-specific installations and immersive encounters for audiences. Her work crosses many disciplines (sound and video design, music technology, nature, architecture and performance) blurring the worlds of visual art and theatre. She explores intimacy through instruction-based work, and frequently commits long periods of time to learning new skills - the Hobby Projects method - which she then shares and explores with her audience members/participants. Abigail actively celebrates and encourages the artist in everyone, disrupting the delineated roles of spectator and performer in playful ways.
"Any good artist should be curious about the world, Abigail Conway takes this curiosity to the next level, she turns it into something both tangible and ephemeral-a performance that exposes audiences to the same risk and thrill of learning that she herself experiences in the process leading up to the pieces."
Deborah Pearson, writer and performer, co-director Forest Fringe
“Abigail Conway makes encounters. The shapes and conventions of her work are not inherited from theatre or visual art, they are instead borrowed from ceremonies, rituals, workshops and other less codified ways of meeting; games of make-believe, a night spent dancing with a stranger, or holding hands in the cinema, or riding pillion on the back of a motorbike.”
Andy Field, writer and performer, co-director Forest Fringe
Performance in an Age of Precarity by Maddy Costa & Andy Field.
‘Becoming part of the landscape - pure delight'
Mary Machen. The Examiner
(RIDE)
‘A truly uplifting experience’
A Younger Theatre
(On Dancefloors)
'An hour with Abigail Conway in her Time Lab is a perfect suspended moment…a gentle weaving of art and craft and a warm bubble-bath of calm.'
Stewart Pringle, The Stage
(Time Lab)
'At the time I am working, it is not meditative or reflective. That comes after, and will continue, I am sure… Abigail Conway’s performance will become a central reference point...
Time Lab … reveals that the construction of time is a labour. Time does not simply flow, it is shaped.'
Simon Bowes
(Time Lab)
‘Wonderful’
Lyn Gardner,The Guardian
(On the Tip of your Tongue)
‘A quietly spiritual piece Tip of Your Tongue. Delicate, seemingly simple– but with a residue of thoughts to digest’.
Mary Brennan, The Herald Scotland
(On the Tip of your Tongue)
'I hold the bow in my hand and I can feel the weight of it. I pull back the string … for the first time I really feel the capricious violence buried in this way of talking about love...This is a dream landscape in which we can renegotiate our relationship to the exhausted language of love...Cupid is not a love story; it is the story of love itself, how we think and talk about it, and as such if the piece is about anything it is about us. At the huge, beating heart of Cupid is a generous and joyous fascination with people.'
Andy Field, This is Tomorrrow
(Cupid)
'There is something rather thrilling about watching an entire city mushroom in a room almost overnight - particularly when you are building it yourself...A piece of art is built around you that is also - for the fleeting period it exists - a genuine community'.
Lyn Gardner, The Guardian
(home sweet home)