Stacey Gillian Abe was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1990. In 2014, she graduated from Kyambogo University, Kampala, with a BA in Art and Industrial Design. Abe’s practice includes photography, sculpture, installation, performance and painting. Her concepts highlight the strengths and fragility of the female mind and aim to refute stereotypes attached to black women. Each space she works on has a context and is given an interpretation specific to it. The preconceptions she addresses manifest in imagined places that are both complementary and antagonistic to one another, giving the work a surreal mystical quality.
Abe combines a metaphorical and experimental approach to her work by incorporating material such as glass, ceramics, fibres, textures, and photographs. Her work draws attention to the hand-made through the method of tying together, stitching, clustering, and pairing – all of which are assembled into a metaphotical concept. In her 2017 series titled Seat of Honor, Abe generated dialogue around power and position. She depicted herself on and next to a throne covered with ceramic vaginas and unpacked the various levels of perception, power, and positioning of the female body. The throne symbolised her acceptance of her femininity, the gender pointed to the female dilemma between a celebration of youth and acknowledgement of maturity.
Abe’s ideas are generated from a personal context and are then exaggerated, shrunk, or fragmented from which it is possible to shift meaning and interpretations. According to her, human beings are spiritual beings which makes it impossible for there to be a clear cut boundary between the spiritual and material worlds.
In 2016 she released her body of work titled Enya-Sa where she used small ceramic sculptures which she placed on ordinary plates as a way of juxtaposing food and sexual satisfaction in contemporary society. Abe’s aspirations for her work are that it inspires and motivates communities, mainly the female community. She seeks to inspire awareness around identity, gender, spirituality, and cultural mysticism, the past and present.
In 2018, Abe was listed among the Forbes Africa 30 under 30 Creatives. She has held artist residencies at the Fondation Blachère in Apt, France in 2018 and at the Urbane Künste in Bochum, Germany in 2019. Her work has been exhibited at Nairobi Museum Nairobi, Kenya; at the Institut Francais Kinshasha in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo; and at the 12th Dakar Biennale in Dakar, Senegal. In 2022 she had her first solo exhibition with Unit London in England.
