Interspecies Entanglements : Abi Palmer | Slime Mother

8 - 30 September 2025
Interspecies Entanglements , Abi Palmer | Slime Mother

Abi Palmer

Slime Mother (2024)

Single-channel digital video

6 mins 54 secs

Edition 1 of 3

 

Screened 8-30 September 2025

    • Abi Palmer, Wet, Hot Slugs at the Go Go Club: Leroy, 2023
      Abi Palmer, Wet, Hot Slugs at the Go Go Club: Leroy, 2023
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    • Abi Palmer, Wet, Hot Slugs at the Go Go Club: Sweet Lorraine, 2023
      Abi Palmer, Wet, Hot Slugs at the Go Go Club: Sweet Lorraine, 2023
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    • Abi Palmer, Wet, Hot Slugs at the Go Go Club: Hurley, 2023
      Abi Palmer, Wet, Hot Slugs at the Go Go Club: Hurley, 2023
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    • Abi Palmer, Wet, Hot Slugs at the Go Go Club: Lou, 2023
      Abi Palmer, Wet, Hot Slugs at the Go Go Club: Lou, 2023
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    • Abi Palmer, Wet, Hot Slugs at the Go Go Club: Nancy, 2023
      Abi Palmer, Wet, Hot Slugs at the Go Go Club: Nancy, 2023
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    • Abi Palmer, Wet, Hot Slugs at the Go Go Club: Priscilla, 2023
      Abi Palmer, Wet, Hot Slugs at the Go Go Club: Priscilla, 2023
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    • Abi Palmer, Felis Limax (Slug Cat), 2024
      Abi Palmer, Felis Limax (Slug Cat), 2024
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    • Abi Palmer, For Sancta Catarina / Limax Christus, 2025
      Abi Palmer, For Sancta Catarina / Limax Christus, 2025
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    • Abi Palmer, Slime Mother, 2024
      Abi Palmer, Slime Mother, 2024
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  • Slime Mother (2024) combines spoken word with languorous panning shots of slugs sliding, twisting and suspending from branches. A narrator’s...
    Film still from Slime Mother (2024) by Abi Palmer

    Slime Mother (2024) combines spoken word with languorous panning shots of slugs sliding, twisting and suspending from branches. A narrator’s voice guides us through a ‘slug-god world’, recounting memories of a childhood spent hating slugs, pouring salt and flicking them away, to a new perspective of worship, love and coexistence. Palmer’s words, combined with beautifully composed film work, transform the slug from a hated body into the divine.

     
    Exhibitions:
    Slime Mother (solo exhibition), Site, Sheffield (Oct 2025 - Feb 2026)
    A Millennium Before Them, to their Spirit!, Museum of Odesa Modern Art, Odesa (2025)
    Slime Mother (film installation), The Bluecoat, Liverpool (2025)
    Slime Mother (solo exhibition), Chapter, Cardiff (2024)
     
    Publications: 
    Post Art Clarity, Abi Palmer at Chapter Cardiff, Issey Scott (2024)  
  • Film still from Slime Mother (2024) by Abi Palmer

  • Kai Hazelwood | For Snakecestors & Slime Mothers

    In response to Slime Mother by Abi Palmer

    Dear Slime Mother

    I live with snakes

    One is now sleeping

    Peacefully at the foot of my bed

    Guiding me into reptilian rest

    Slithering slowness

    Teaching me to shapeshift my way 

    Home

    To myself

    My snakecestors led me to you

    Encourage me to linger at your slippery altar

    Rest my head on the earth

    In slimy supplication 

     

    Let me live where soft, slow, slippery bodies are revered 

    Where divine slick dances

    Move at the pace of our seasons 

    Yours and mine

     

    Let me live 

    Softening into my mattress with the reverence of a slug into the earth

    Both knowing our bodies will be welcomed

    Resting

    Held in whatever shape they need or wish

     

    I long for a world loving of slowness

    My slowness

    Of slipping further and further from urgency

    From them

    Towards you

    Towards me  

     

    I will live 

    Where WE are sacred

    Not productivity

    There you will find me

    Worshipping time slowed by thick loving slime

    A willing acolyte of the Slug God

    A child of snakes 

     

    Here salt from my tears 

    A balm not a weapon

    They nourish

    Our full bellies spilling freely into sunshine

     
    Kai Hazelwood is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles & The Netherlands.
  • Abi Palmer

    Portrait of Abi Palmer by Robin Silas Christian

    Abi Palmer

    Abi Palmer (b. UK) is an artist and writer who lives and works in London. She explores sick bodies, viscous textures and ecological landscapes. Major works include mixed-media solo exhibition Slime Mother (Chapter Cardiff, 2024, Site Sheffield, 2025); film series Abi Palmer Invents the Weather (Artangel, 2023) books: SLUGS: A Manifesto (Makina Books, 2024) and Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020); and interactive gambling arcade Crip Casino (exhibited at Tate Modern, Somerset House, Wellcome Collection and Collective Edinburgh).

    Abi’s work has toured internationally, with exhibitions and screenings at EMST (Athens), Kunsthaus Baselland (Basel), Museum of Odesa Modern Art (Odesa), Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto Mississauga), Cultural Centre of Belgrade (Belgrade), SAHA (Istanbul) and at Crip Arte Spazio at La Biennnale di Venezia 2024 (Venice), the first major international exhibition of the UK Disability Arts Movement.

    Her copulating slug sculptures were selected as part of the Frieze Corridor Commission in 2023. She was named a Bloomberg New Contemporaries artist in 2023, and is the recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists (2021) and Artangel’s Thinking Time award (2020). Sanatorium was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.

     

    Abi Palmer’s solo exhibition Slime Mother opens at Site Gallery in Sheffield on 3rd October 2025 until 1st Feb 2026

     
    "I make work that will hold you. I use film, sculpture, text and installation. My films are sensory and tactile. I want you to feel rooted in the body, aware of your breath, your tendons. When I touch a leaf, I want you to feel touched. I build worlds within tiny confines: a box, a bed, a garden. My writing is fragmented, jumping between high and low register, bitchy little anecdotes and manifesto. I often address the female mystics: St Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe and her constant crying. I think through my hands but my hands hurt often. I am a scruncher, a builder-upper. I take household items, tinfoil, tape and wire, and squeeze shapes that make you feel something. I combine cartoonish, DIY elements with ambitious grandiosity. In Slime Mother, I recreated Rodin’s The Kiss, with two 8-foot long jesmonite slugs wrapped around a massive disco ball. 3 floating sluggy comrades rotated, eerily - a slug orgy. Elvis crooned in the background. It was absurd and awe-inspiring all at once. I scattered bean bags underneath the slugs to create a site of transformative healing and rest. I believe sensory intervention can be used to manifest other worlds and ways of being. I am moved by wetness, viscosity: one drip falling in slow motion, a jelly that jiggles when it’s slapped." - Abi Palmer
  • Kai Hazelwood

    Kai Hazelwood

    Kai Hazelwood is a multi award winning transdisciplinary Disabled, Black, and queer artist, researcher, and embodied healing practitioner. She has taught at universities and art institutions around the world, facilitating communal healing and the unraveling of embodied white supremacy. Kai is the founder and director of Good Trouble Makers, a practice driven collaborative arts project celebrating queer identities and centering disabled and chronically ill QTBIPOC. She is currently working on her first book Shedding: A Playbook.