Abigail Norris

Abigail Norris is a UK-based sculptor whose practice investigates memory, materiality, and the entangled relationships between humans and other living beings. After a two-decade career in film and multimedia, Norris pursued a lifelong ambition to study sculptural practice, completing an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2022. This formal shift catalysed a rigorous studio method in which found domestic materials, textiles and soft-sculptural techniques are brought into dialogue with casting, print and installation strategies to create works that are at once intimate and elegiac.

Working across object-making and installation, Norris’s work is preoccupied with fragility, repair, absence and the slow logic of care. Her pieces frequently use reclaimed fabric, stitched forms and hybrid cast elements that evoke wounds, nests or fossilised body parts — what she terms in statements a “language of the body” through which personal and cultural memory surfaces. The tactile, often rough-hewn surfaces of her sculptures insist on the hand and the process of making, while repeated gestures of stitching, tearing and re-joining articulate the idea of repair as both practical and metaphorical. 

Norris’s technical range is notable: she combines soft-sculpture (sewing, upholstery and textile assemblage) with lost-wax casting and ceramic or mixed-media accretions. Residencies and studio experiments have led to hybrid works — for example, projects described as Lost-Wax for Lost Species and a Scrying series exhibited within fair platforms — which demonstrate her interest in combining organic forms with processes associated with traditional sculpture and print practice. This hybridity enables a slippage between the animate and the object that sits at the heart of her inquiry.  

Since completing her MA, Norris has rapidly established a public profile through exhibitions, talks and institutional recognition. Highlights include a Tate Lates talk on “Soft Sculpture and Material Matters,” participation in the London Art Fair (Platform) and exhibitions with Julian Page Projects (including Prints Then / Prints Now and the forthcoming Ghosts in the Nursery installation). She has been shortlisted for and won several awards — notably the YSP/RCA Graduate Award (2022) and the Ingram Prize (2023) — acknowledgements that have consolidated curatorial and collector interest.  

Norris’s works are in emerging institutional collections and private holdings; the Ingram Collection lists her as a recent acquisition, demonstrating early institutional collecting interest. Her practice also extends into collaborative and site-specific projects and residencies (including Body & Place at Owlpen Manor and the RCA/YSP residency), reflecting a commitment to working with place, publics and ecological narratives. Critics and curators have noted the melancholic and elegiac tenor of her work — a “lament” for the despoliation of nature — which positions Norris within contemporary dialogues about care, loss and the politics of material reuse.

In studio and exhibition, Abigail Norris continues to develop a sculptural language that fuses the personal and the political, the forensic and the poetic. Her objects do not simply represent absence or ruin; they enact processes of re-assembly and witness, inviting viewers into a reflective encounter with material histories, labour and the responsibilities of making in an age of environmental anxiety.