Abi Palmer is an artist and writer exploring the relationship between linguistic and physical communication. 

Crip Casino - her interactive gambling arcade parodying the wellness industry and institutionalised spaces - has been exhibited at Tate Modern, Somerset House, Wellcome Collection and Collective Edinburgh. Her debut book Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020) is a fragmented memoir, jumping between luxury thermal pool, and blue inflatable bathtub. Sanatorium was listed as a ‘Best Book of 2020’ in The Guardian, the White Review and What Page Podcast. It was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize. 

Abi is a recipient of the Artangel Thinking Time Award (2020) and the Paul Hamlyn “Award for Artists” (2021). 

SANATORIUM: A shared mystical experience 

A young woman spends a month taking the waters at a thermal water-based rehabilitation facility in Budapest. On her return to London, she attempts to continue her recovery using an £80 inflatable blue bathtub. The tub becomes a metaphor for the intrusion of disability; a trip hazard in the middle of an unsuitable room, slowly deflating and in constant danger of falling apart. Abi Palmer’s Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020) moves through contrasting space--bathtub to thermal pool, land to water, day to night--interlacing memoir, poetry and meditations on the body to create a mesmerising, mercurial debut. 

Join us for an immersive mystical performance where Sanatorium meets film and theatre.  Fragments from the book are scored with projected overlays, blending haunted dresses, immersive mycological meditations, analogue footage of Abi in the bathtub (directed and shot by Anna Ulrikke Andersen) and Abi’s own diaristic fragments from the Sanatorium itself. Themes of chronic pain, queerness and mysticism emerge. Lose yourself in the blurred lines between pain and healing; land and water; sinking — and what it means to float.

Abi will be complimenting this stunning performance with a Workshop - please see our workshops page for more information.