Royal College of Art (group residency) / Abi Joy Samuel
photo Simon Beckmann
Royal College of Art (group residency) / Abi Joy Samuel / sculpture
Abi Joy Samuel (b.1993) is a London-based artist whose practice weaponises monstrosity as a methodology for subverting control. Working across durational performance, sculpture, painting and portrait photography, she constructs seductive yet disquieting tableaux that confront indirectly-drawing the viewer in before destabilising embedded power structures.
Her bricolages assemble materials that contradict cultural scripts of womanhood: baby bottles fused with rusted car fragments, leather gloves and floral gestures pierced by thorn-like steel rods that act as museum-like armature. Bricolage operates not simply as a method, but as a system of thought-an ethics of resourcefulness. Found materials, worn and weathered, carry prior lives; their histories accumulate into sculptural bodies.
This anti-perfectionist approach resists industrial polish and capitalist ideals of production, bypassing economies of exchange through acts of reclamation and reuse. Speed, instinct and immediacy become strategies of both control and release. In her paintings, figures hover between abstraction and representation, suspended in states of near-formation.
Her self-portrait photography deploys pastiche as a deliberate distortion, using humour and caricature to dissect and destabilise inherited gender roles.
Abi Joy Samuel
@abijoysamuelart
In partnership with the Royal College of Art, this group residency at Joya: AiR was curated by guest artist Annie Edwards (GBA 26, MA RCA, BFA) www.annieedwards.com
