Tom Abba makes collages, books, immersive experiences, and deals with the relationship between form and content across multiple platforms. His work is principally concerned with the world as a site of pressure — what accumulates at a site, what a place withholds, and the ways in which the visual record and a person's experience of somewhere can be accurate and entirely misleading at the same time.
About →Lab
Recent thinking All →-
Paving — working title
A map of a nearby city, concertinaed. Sections of the same streets pressed against each other along irregular fold lines, like a paper map folded badly. A presence dot moves with the reader's physical position.
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Whiteout — gates
A series of three gates — date, weather, name — through which a reader passes before entering an immersive experience. A narrator speaks from somewhere far in the future.
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New World — series tests
Working notes from the New World series — a set of square collages developing in parallel with Folk Horror, using the same format but a different tonal and thematic vocabulary.
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Photopoetry — working notes
Ongoing experiments combining photographic images and poetic text as a single visual unit — not illustration, not caption, but something that requires both registers to work.
Work
Selected projects All →-
Undercurrents
A sequenced series of eighteen works tracing movement, submersion, and the body's relationship to water — archival pigment prints made from layered photographic sources.
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Folk Horror
Twenty-six square collages drawn from the visual grammar of British folk horror — edgeland sites, ritual remnants, figures half-consumed by landscape.
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Cosmic
A sustained series of collages exploring deep time, geological formation, and the visual language of astronomical scale — surfaces that hold something between the mineral, the celestial and the horrific.
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Borrowed Blood
This whole project is about books. About what the object that is a book can do, and especially about what a novel might be if the whole form was upended and rethought.