About Abigail Hampsey
Abigail Hampsey is a multidisciplinary artist, painter, and baker. Born in Lancaster, she gained a first-class honours degree in Fine Art from Newcastle University in 2019. After being awarded the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award in Painting (2020–22), she completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art.
Alongside her artistic practice, Abigail Hampsey is a business owner, baker and market trader. Carving out an artistic practice in the North of England as a working-class woman, her studio has no threshold, seeing no delineation between the types of places or spaces in which her work can be made. Her process is fluid, fundamentally shaped by her lived experience of daily life. Her paintings reflect a lived reality rooted in the outdoors, a rural upbringing, and a slowly urbanising environment. While somewhat autobiographical, her work often references imagery from the art historical canon, drawing on allegory and archetypal narratives. Abigail has a deep interest in indexical language, modes of display and object associations, seeing academic as well as whimsical language as equal modes of communication.
Hampsey has taught at both Newcastle University and Lancaster, and has exhibited across the UK with Liminal Gallery (Margate), Abingdon Studios (Blackpool), Workplace Gallery (London), and the Saatchi Gallery, as well as internationally with Monti 8 in Rome and in Rotterdam. She became the first recipient of the Rebecca Scott Award, spending three months at The British School at Rome.