Bio

Through a sculptural practice informed by personal history, mythology, and lived experience across multiple geographies, Abbie Griffiths probes the intimate and often unseen forces that shape human connection, memory, and vulnerability.

Born in 1987 and currently based in London, Abbie draws on her upbringing within a lineage of manual labourers using materials that are common to her and common within our homes to create abstracted figurative sculpture caught in transformative moments. Her brother is a builder, her step dad a plumber, and her mother has been a cleaner and painter/decorator. Grounded by her formal training at Lyme Academy College of Fine Art, she has returned to construction materials such as concrete, plaster polyurethane expanding foam and rebar, and second-hand domestic fabrics to build a world that tells her fragmented personal stories and universal stories based in global myth.

Polyurethane becomes flesh-like matter; plaster reads as gesture or limb, worn textiles such as pillowcases are reimagined as skins that sag, decorate, and hold emotional residue. Her work is rooted in the tension between materiality and meaning, exploring thresholds between order and chaos, permanence and vulnerability.

Having lived in England, Kenya, and the United States, Abbie also engages with the myths and intimacies of global culture, often reflecting on themes of love, loss, belonging, and selfhood within a broader interconnected world. Alongside her sculptural practice, her writing deepens these concerns, offering a reflective space through which personal narrative and conceptual inquiry converge. Her work has been exhibited internationally across Europe, Africa, and North America.

Read more about her fascination with bedsheets as a material here.

CV

  • 2006 - 2010

    University of London - School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

    2013 - 2015

    Lyme Academy College of Fine Art

  • 2026

    • (Un)Seen Exhibition curated by Zoe Goetzmann at 20 Fenchurch Street, for the inaugural exhibition of Hypha Curates new Gallery space, London

    • Blink exhibition - group show in the Angel Room at Safehouse 1, Peckham, London

    • SelfSame Exhibition curated by Zoe Goetzmann at Art’otel, Hoxton, London

    2025

    • Dreams and Nightmares, online exhibition curated by Rosemary Jane Cronin in collaboration with Gertrude art app.

    • Works from the Collection of Lady Victoria Beecham, Thames-Side Gallery, Woolwich, London

    2024

    • Imaginary Lines, curated by Maya Binkin, Daniel Katz Gallery, Mayfair, London

    • Influencers, Curated by Maya Binkin, Art74, Milan, Italy

    • On Tenderness and Time, Curated by Jenn Ellis of Apsara, Daniel Katz Gallery, Mayfair, London

    2023

    • Women in Art Fair, Mall Galleries, London UK

    2022

    • (8) A Night of Fashion and Art, Brooklyn New York, USA

    • TEN, Crit Haven @ 770 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT, USA

    • 6 x 6, City Gallery, New Haven, CT, USA

    • Corpus Luteum, Solo exhibition of paintings, Atticus, New Haven, CT, USA

    • Opus ad Vivifica, Schelfhaudt Gallery, Bridgeport, CT, USA

    2020

    • The View from Here, Artspace, New Haven, CT, USA

    2019

    • Damn! Order in the Disorderly: Bloom in the Chaos, Yale West Campus, Artspace, New Haven, CT

    2015

    • 9th Annual Juried Student Exhibition, Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, Old Lyme, CT, USA

    • Transported/Illuminated: Juried Exhibition, Artspace, New Haven, CT, USA

    2010

    • Perceptions, Solo exhibition of paintings, The Rusty Nail, Nairobi, Kenya

  • 2026 - Shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

    2024 - Francis Reckitt artists grant award

    2024 - 2027: Acme Studios - Live /work space tenant

    2023 - Xenia Creative Retreat

Curatorial Texts

Classical Domesticism by Rachel Stratton, Modern and Contemporary Curator and Research Associate at Yale Center for British Art

Abbie Griffiths’ sculptures challenge categorization and embody contradiction. The classical form of a winged Nike, goddess of victory, is constructed using common domestic materials – polyurethane foam, old bedsheets, and washed-out pillowcases. The bed clothes bear the marks of years of use, a rejection of the static, youth of the classical ideal. Reality is laid bare, the passage of time and the degradation of all things. The polyurethane foam also ages, gaining a warm golden hue through exposure to sun. Generally used to fill the spaces between, the foam here takes on a form of its own, a mass of tumorous bulges, a body without skin. Without this protective layer, interior spills forth, the messy stuff of everyday living.

[On “Tempered”, 2022] A hand extends from nowhere grasping at the flesh of a writhing torso, its fingers brushing the inner thigh in a gesture both erotic and violent. Bernini’s Daphne and Apollo comes to mind in the contorted form of a figure twisting in motion and the sensual touch of a hand on flesh. Like Bernini’s piece, it captures a moment of explosive movement trapped in stasis. Yet, where Bernini depicts the dramatic climax of this tale of thwarted lust, Griffiths leaves narrative ambiguous and unresolved. We are left questioning whether the advance is invited or unwanted, whether we are witness to a moment of pleasure or fear? Voyeuristic unease creeps in and still we remain in place, drawn deeper into this climax without end.