Photo: Nicki-Joe Baxter
Trip Hazard, 2017
Photo: Brian Barton
Trip Hazard was an hour-long performance which took place on 3rd December 2017 at the Broadway Gallery in Letchworth Garden City. Audience members were invited to take a newspaper-format zine and handmade badge as documents of the performance before they were seated.
Abbott used electronic audio equipment manipulated live to accompany the performance including a Korg Kaossilator, the vocoder on a Microkorg as well as a contact microphone connected to a drawing board.
As well as the live audio and the physical presence of the artist, a vintage slide projector was used to display enlarged micro-drawings that Abbott incorporated into the show.
Props included in the performance: fairy lights, platform heels, a plastic lobster, strawberry laces, a transparent sheet and a Barbie.
Please see an extract of Trip Hazard above, as filmed by Brian Barton and John Vincent and edited by Callum Abbott.
Tony Hawk's Psycho Brother, 2012
You Cannot Be Serious? 2011
You Cannot Be Serious? is a performance project from 2011, based around the phenomenon of 'invisible tennis' where players use an invisible ball to play the game. Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg's performance piece: Open Score (1966) and the final sequence from Antonioni's film Blow Up (1966), combined with John McEnroe's infamous outburst, You Cannot Be Serious? is the title of a series of works across multiple disciplines that explore ideas around performance documentation.
The series culminated in an exhibition displaying all works associated with the invisible tennis theme and a performance which can be viewed as the film above.
This photograph is the only record of this can of bespoke invisible tennis balls made exclusively for the Wimbledon queue in 2011 because the stewards threw it away. Abbott performed invisible tennis with the queueing public and once inside Wimbledon even got to sign somebody's giant tennis ball.
Performance relic at the end of Callum Abbott Presents: You Cannot Be Serious?, 2011, a one-night-only exhibition. A smashed tennis racquet is inspected by the audience.
Original live performance of You Cannot Be Serious? which took place at Peek Show, The Biscuit Factory, Bermondsey in 2011.
Pig Girl & Latex Boy, 2010 - 2012
Photo: Kristine Bumeistere
Light Show (pictured above), a performance witnessed by only three spectators at New Gallery in Peckham was one of many collaborative pieces with fellow Drawing student Norwegian artist, Anette Friedrich Johannessen.
A mutual rejection of painting and observational drawing led the two artists to explore performance together as a duo. This collaborative output came to be known as Pig Girl and Latex Boy.
Coming from different parts of the world, with different life experiences and an age gap of ten years, Johannessen and Abbott found a mutual artistic direction thriving on spontaneity and intuition through performance. Through rhythm, repetition and physical body contact the two artists wanted to make work that was alive and exciting.
Pig Girl & Latex Boy, 2012, Threshold, New Gallery, London
Pig Girl & Latex Boy, 2012, LUPA, London
Early collaborations included responses to specific objects as well as each other's rhythmic movements. After a number of performances with and without live audiences, and inspired by a filmed piece by fellow artist Sophie Chery, Pig Girl and Latex Boy was born and from then on, the names stuck. Latex Boy is the overtly sexual, gender-questioning yin to Pig Girl's grotesquely un-feminine yang.