Words by Kristian Day, November 2025

Annabel Pettigrew, ‘Healing Chamber’

Healing Chamber marks a development in Annabel Pettigrew’s practice, emerging from an intense period of personal loss. This experience has shaped an ongoing inquiry into grief as both subject and process, prompting the artist to consider how loss can alter perceptions of self, time and material reality.

Pettigrew’s recent work brings together methods drawn from meditation, ritual and research to explore the connections between inner experience and physical form. Through guided visualisation and meditative practice, she constructs what she describes as an ‘astral realm’, an imagined environment through which she examines memory, transition and renewal. Each journey within this space is documented through writing, drawing and material experimentation, forming the basis for artworks that translate these experiences into tangible form.

Healing Chamber presents a vision of one such imagined space, recreated as an installation through fabric, sculpture and sound. The work functions as a contemplative environment, at once architectural and intimate, that invites reflection on the transformative aspects of grief and healing.

Working across textiles, video, sound, ceramics, performance and installation, Pettigrew explores how personal experience can be reinterpreted through material and process. She also leads Throes of Grief, a collective platform supporting artists whose practices engage with loss and transformation.

Annabel Pettigrew studied BA (Hons) Fine Art at Kingston School of Art (2003–2006) and completed her MA Fine Art at Kingston in 2013. She holds a PGCE in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and has taught Fine Art in higher education since 2011, specialising in sculpture and installation.

Exhibition images by Will Slater.