Abigail Villarroel

Abigail Villarroel is a Venezuelan-born, Birmingham-based artist, writer and facilitator whose practice explores queerness, diaspora, family and belonging. Working across painting, drawing, text and community-led projects, he creates work that is both personal and expansive, often beginning from lived experience and building outward into something more symbolic, emotional and storied.

The approach to creation is intuitive, reflective and rooted in feeling shaped by research, memory and cultural reference. Migration, exile, intimacy, folklore, camp, masculinity and the search for home all move through the work in different ways. He is interested in how art can hold contradiction at once: tenderness and theatricality, grief and humour, beauty and unease.

Alongside his studio practice, Abigail is deeply committed to public and community-facing work. Facilitation and workshops are an important part of how he understands creativity: as something that can open up conversation, offer connection and make space for others. Across everything, his work is driven by a desire to give queer and diasporic experience a richer visual language, one that feels sensuous, honest and fully alive.