Abbie Coombs combines writing, performance, sculpture, and installation in treading the hazy line where life ends, and performance begins. Closely following her therapeutic journey through the lens of womanhood, her practice is a manifestation of the responsibility she assumes to lay bare her deepest vulnerabilities in a simultaneous retaking of power.
Her performances strive to transcend the purely subjective as fictionalised narratives, while coinciding with autobiographical fact and a live audience to give rise to an affect-based mis en scene, a kind of dialogical theatre. At a psychological level, her work attempts to challenge ‘inter-passivity’ and the viewer’s emotional responsiveness in a public situation, creating a reflective space that fosters a discursive environment around the difficult but urgent topics of abortion and violence against women. Coombs implicates her audience in the construction and articulation of the violence inherent in our hierarchy of power relations. This exposes both the ‘performer’ and the ‘participant’, and ‘patriarchy’ vs ‘subject’, positioned in the force field of empathy and trust within a wider world of indifference and disbelief towards artists and women.
Coombs is completing an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (University of the Arts London) (at a predicted Distinction level), for which she was awarded The Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship (2024). She received her Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the same University in 2023, for which she was awarded the UAL Home Postgraduate Scholarship.
Since 2021 her work has been exhibited in a number of exhibitions internationally, including at Tate Britain in London (2021), Contrapposto Gallery in Athens (2024), and AVA Gallery in Ljubljana (2024), during which she swapped lives with the Slovenian artist, Iva Suhadolnik-Gregorin (who later became her partner in the artist duo, ‘The Queen of Pentacles’), for 5 days (‘being you being me being me being you’). Her other recent performances include ‘take the sixth exit’ (2024), performed for 6 days outside Tate Britain in London, and ‘Senses of Self I’ (2023), also performed outside Tate Britain. She was also selected by the award-winning poet, Claudia Rankine, to participate in the exhibition ‘PLOT: CLAUDIA RANKINE’ at Chelsea Space in London (2023).
Coombs established and runs the London-based Writer’s Collective, ‘The Circle’, and has been published on a number of occasions in Force Majeure (2023, 2024), by the UAL Writer’s Collective. She is currently working on her first novel, which she hopes to publish by the end of 2024.
Coombs’ creative practice is informed by knowledge and political influences from a previous career in the legal sector, where she practiced as an antitrust and complex litigation lawyer in the English High Court, Court of Appeal, and Supreme Court, as well as other European jurisdictions. While she found that legal language was too restrictive to articulate creative solutions to complex problems she faced, her legal career taught her the power of the speech act in the chamber, and the reverence of the goat skin of the parchment of legal acts, where the performance of words in a particular costume could determine the future of the basic reproductive rights of women across an entire nation. For example, Coombs was part of the legal team that submitted the complaint to the European Commission (on a pro bono basis) in relation to the restriction of women’s abortion rights in Poland. Coombs received her MA in Law (Distinction, 2021) and BA in Law (First Class, 2017) from Queens’ College, the University of Cambridge, for which she was awarded the Foundation Scholarship for academic excellence.
In addition to her art practice, Coombs is a Visiting Lecturer in creative writing at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts, London. She is also part of the Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts Subjectivity and Feminisms Research Group, in which she participated in a panel discussion on International Women's Day (London, 2023). She is also the Creative Director for the award-winning singer-songwriter, Victoria Canal.
