Abigail Tulis views her work as a craft through which to build and explore a personal mythology. Through an intuitive method of selecting and recording, she works by directly engaging with the remnants of the golden ages, minimizing the input of digitalization. Documenting material facts by noting the drama that arises from her interaction with the subject results in the sensual record of the pursuit of the ideal, not the ideal itself. 

 

Tulis borrows forms and restates themes from those past creative rituals of observation, exploration and of self-prescribed limitation to find a deeper inspection of conceptual design and emotion and provide the framework for the expression an inner world. This intimate sphere of the artist is peopled with autobiographical, exoskeleton beings.

 

Armor, with its protective, fabricated, and designed qualities, is the perfect counterpoint to insects, with their highly [emotionally] sensitive, elegant, yet fragile anatomy. This cast of characters, often betrayed, tormented, ecstatic, sensual, grotesque, carnal, divine, are the companions of the mind’s fancy. These creatures seek to escape the cognitive dissonance that the artist and the collective conscious confront in the transience that results from the endless over-production and globalization of our era. Recently, she has begun to expand on this body of work with anthropomorphic bug soldiers, mostly via etchings and various versions of the same image, and also beginning to design drawings and scenery to accompany then. Some are in erotic scenes.

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Originally from Tennessee she benefited from the tutelage of Cessna Decosimo. She continued her studies at the Grand Central Academy in Manhattan and was awarded a Hudson River fellowship in landscape painting. In addition, she studied design and architectural rendering at the Institute for Classical Art and Architecture in New York. Both architects and interior designers commissioned her sculptures, and she has been featured in Vanity Fair. Her work was shown in New York, Tennessee, and the Netherlands.