Meet Abigail Portner
Meet Abigail Portner, a visual artist and production designer based in the US. She creates large scale interactive installations, videos and sculptures. Most of her work involves playful stop motions, printed patterns, and illustrations.
Abby has spent a lot of her career on the road as a touring lighting and production designer for bands like John Cale and Animal Collective.
Her brilliantly playful works have really stood out in a world that feels increasingly complex. We were excited to speak to Abby recently in the lead-up to her upcoming course, Visualizing Noise.
How important for you are analogue practices in your creative process (drawing, painting...)?
It's the main source of what I make. To be honest I think it's kinda sad that these are not considered analogue, lol. I obviously use computers to do my video work but it is all based on drawings, prints and sculptures.
I don't start anything from the computer. To me, it then has no life or emotion; you can’t feel the person involved anymore. I wouldn't make any work without drawing or painting.
How do you think working with space is different from working with image? What are the limitations of working with image in opposition to working with space?
I think about them the same way. Most of my drawings are held in a space that is very similar to my animations. They have patterns , colors, and textures. This is the same with building a space. It starts usually from a drawing, an idea, a color, an image and then that is created and built out into a world someone can exist in. To me, my installations and stage designs are just 3D drawings.
In doing installations, stage design for other people and concerts, do you ever work with certain rules? If so, how do you manage to comply with them, as well as allowing yourself to create freely?
The rules really depend on who I'm working for and aren’t that exciting; usually it’s money , time and space even before concept. How to make things fit into a trailer truck , how to get things to breakdown, how to make it within a budget.
It's a very creative process, but stage design, unlike fine art, has a lot of rules that come first before you even come up with an idea to share . A band could love the idea but it could never be made because it doesn’t work within the tours design. It's something I have just gotten used to, and once you know all the limitations, it's easier to know what to suggest or design based on all of the above.
How chaotic or controlled is your creative process? How much room for mistake, chance, surprises is there?
It’s a bit of both I think. It’s pretty chaotic since I work in so many mediums yet very controlled since I’m also mainly a designer and went to school for design. So there are things that will always cross my mind when making art that maybe someone in strictly fine art would not think of; whether this is good or bad, it’s something very deeply ingrained in my thought process. My ideas are chaotic for sure and I’m constantly thinking of ideas of what to make every day, even if they never get made.
Your methodology seems to align with having fun and creating through playing. With what disposition do you approach the artistic practice?
Yea, I mean i like to have fun! The world is insane enough. I don't find it necessary to make serious or dark art . We have enough of that every day around us all the time. For sure, I draw a lot of monsters and creatures and things but it's all based on childhood or imagination never really ever based in reality. There is a part of everyone's brain that can connect to that, especially these days. That’s more of where I come from when creating, I don’t wanna depress people or make them uncomfortable, I’m just not that type of person.
What are the advantages of creating through senses such as listening, touching, feeling? How does that enrich your creative processes?
I think we tend to only look at things for inspiration. We’re taught a lot in schools to look at things, look at books, go to museums, etc. I think this is very important, but there are other ways of being inspired.
When you listen to music there's so much emotion, feeling and nostalgia connected with it, also smell and taste. You can picture memories, feelings, places you’ve been. It’s a great starting point to create from. You will end up in a much more interesting place than looking at your phone can take you.
Nowadays it's very hard to find space and time to listen to oneself and connect with our bodies. How important is it for you to connect with your body? What things do you do to make sure you listen to yourself while creating?
I'm a long distance runner and I do Transcendental Meditation. I think touring has really taught me its pretty much the only thing you have on the road and you can’t make anything or be creative if you're tired, distracted or worn out. I'm not the best at it always but I find both of these practices grounding no matter where I am in the world and helps me be more creative.
Your class is titled Visualizing Noise but it has so much more that people will be exploring in the course. What is it that first drew you to that title and how does it reflect what people can expect to be creating?
I have to use sound a lot to create stages, drawings, videos and record art. I start from a place of listening to a record. I don’t start from going to a museum for inspiration. I think its something everyone can learn from. Sound is so powerful. Train whistles, records you heard as a kid, dogs barking. Any sound makes you think of an image, a memory, or where you were exactly at the time you heard it. I think its just a fun way to look at being inspired, to think about sound as an art form to create from.
You do lots of live visuals for concerts, if people are interested in getting more involved in that kind of work themselves, do you see this course as a jumping off point or something completely different?
For sure, though, I don’t think its fully tied into that. You don’t have to be a stage designer to use sound to create or be inspired from. For sure if you want to go deeper into learning about stage design and visuals, I’m here for it. But i don’t think you necessarily need to be a stage designer to take this course. It’s more about your senses, using them and pushing yourself to explore sound as a source of inspiration not really just an art form itself.
You also don’t have to be good at music or listen to a lot of music or feel like you have to be tied into sound. It’s just the idea of using sound as a jumping off point for creating paintings, prints, videos installations, and anything you really want to create from this course.
Visualizing Noise takes place this Fall on Tuesdays, 4. November - 2. December
6-8pm CET
For more info and to join: https://www.schoolofma.org/programs/p/fall2025-visualizing-noise