Forest + Found | Abigail Booth

"Booth’s patchworked and painted canvases delve into the internal narratives of imagination, dreams and memory, as they originate in nature."

UK based partnership between artists Max Bainbridge and Abigail Booth. Working across the visual arts and contemporary craft, they draw upon a background in painting and sculpture whilst looking towards a newly developed language of craft, to produce installations that form dialogues between landscape, material and process. Working across a multi-disciplinary language of textiles, painting, sculpture and print, Abigail Booth’s practice explores the emotional capacity of material objects to embody intergenerational memory across time and space. Reflecting on the intrinsic relationship of her materials both to the human body and the psychological condition, her works made from textiles, earth, bone, hair, wood and charcoal are multi-layered, tactile manifestations of our shifting understanding of place and identity. The physical origin of found objects and pigments, cultivated and unearthed from the environments she encounters, become both a tangible and imagined space worked directly into the surface of her works through hand stitching, painting, dyeing and the printed image. Central to her work is an exploration of how our domestic lives, family histories and intimate connection to material objects and the natural world permeate our subconscious throughout our lifetimes. Drawing on the transfer of intergenerational memory and our sense of belonging within a continually evolving material culture, her work is an intimate reflection on the emotional complexities held within our everyday lives, as she purposefully draws us into these dreamt and tactile places, asking us to confront our past and future relationships to the natural world. Born in London in 1991, Abigail Booth studied Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, the San Francisco Art Institute and Chelsea College of Art, from which she graduated in 2013. In 2014 she established Forest + Found, an art collective with whom she works on public commissions, exhibitions and curatorial projects.

Image: Abigail Booth by Pete Helme Photography