Abbie Coombs combines writing, performance, sculpture, and installation in treading the hazy line where life ends, and performance begins. Closely following her therapeutic journey through the lens of womanhood, her practice is a manifestation of the responsibility she assumes to lay bare her deepest vulnerabilities in a simultaneous retaking of power. Through the exposure of her 'self', literally and metaphorically, she hopes to challenge the hegemonic patriarchal structures that dictate societal expectations of women.

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Her performances are an invitation for both herself and the audience to engage in a dialogue about the complexities of womanhood, identity, vulnerability, and the ongoing struggle for autonomy in a world that often seeks to confine and commodify women's bodies. They strive to transcend the purely subjective as fictionalised narratives, while coinciding with autobiographical fact and a live audience to give rise to an affect-based mis en scene, a kind of dialogical theatre. At a psychological level, her work attempts to challenge ‘inter-passivity’ and the viewer’s emotional responsiveness in a public situation, creating a reflective space that fosters a discursive environment around the difficult but urgent topics of abortion and violence against women. Coombs implicates her audience in the construction and articulation of the violence inherent in our hierarchy of power relations. This exposes both the ‘performer’ and the ‘participant’, and ‘patriarchy’ vs ‘subject’, positioned in the force field of empathy and trust within a wider world of indifference and disbelief towards artists and women.

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Coombs established and runs the London-based Writer’s Collective, ‘The Circle’, and has been published on a number of occasions in Force Majeure (2023, 2024), by the UAL Writer’s Collective. She is currently working on her first novel, which she hopes to publish in 2025.

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Coombs’ creative practice is informed by knowledge and political influences from a previous career in the legal sector, where she practiced as an antitrust and complex litigation lawyer in the English High Court, Court of Appeal, and Supreme Court, as well as other European jurisdictions. While she found that legal language was too restrictive to articulate creative solutions to complex problems she faced, her legal career taught her the power of the speech act in the chamber, and the reverence of the goat skin of the parchment of legal acts, where the performance of words in a particular costume could determine the future of the basic reproductive rights of women across an entire nation.