All the worlds you’ll never see explores artist Abi Palmer’s relationship with her housebound cats. She lives on the third floor of an “accessible” building, but that doesn’t make it easy to access the outside. By default, Abi’s kittens are indoor cats, but she started to understand their desire for an outside which they cannot reach. It is a desire very similar to her own, which is why she brought them into her home to begin with. Abi writes “I, too, hunger for the outside world. I, too, am craving wildness.”

Abi has been exploring ways of reproducing the outside world for her cats in ‘miniature’: foraging for found objects such as feathers, plants, and fallen twigs and leaves, and building small indoor forests for the cats to explore. She wanted to invite the experience of becoming lost in nature, to experience reverie. The process of sharing her findings has become a regular aspect of play and bonding. It’s bittersweet: in recreating and discovering aspects of the natural world Abi loves, is grieving for, and can’t access; and being aware that she has passed this experience on to them.

Commissioned by Shape Arts, All the worlds you’ll never see is a short sensory film, originally designed for virtual spaces. Abi says “I wanted to explore the potential of an online gallery, by floating multiple films as if hanging in infinite space, but was surprised by how much my brain wanted me to organise the films as if on one wall of a white cube. This is a boundary I would love to keep pushing – what can the virtual world do for the way that we experience art that is different and transformative?”

A note on poison 
In the film, Abi wanted her cats to experience the magic of finding life growing in the strangest of places. Near her home, a fantastic meadow of wildflowers grows by a large and polluted roundabout. Abi picked some of the flowers and brought them home. However, when she researched the plants, she learned that many of these flowers are toxic to cats and potentially very harmful.

“The conflict here is painful. I tried to create an accessible version of the outdoors for my cats but I was clearly projecting what I felt they should know rather than being led by their needs. It’s also true that the moment I picked the flowers, they lost what I attempted to convey.

This very often happens in access. I am left reflecting on what it means to translate an experience in ways that are both powerful and safe for the bodies who will be taking part. How do you distill and translate the essence of a poppy without using a poppy? It always comes back to centring the user.”

Animal welfare statement: throughout this process, the cats were closely supervised. No animals were harmed in the making of this film.

Abi Palmer is an artist, writer and filmmaker exploring the relationship between linguistic and physical communication. Key work includes Crip Casino—an interactive gambling arcade parodying the wellness industry and institutionalised spaces—shown at Tate Modern, Somerset House and Wellcome Collection (2018-20)—and Sanatorium—a fragmented memoir that jumps between a luxury thermal pool and a blue inflatable bathtub (Penned in the Margins, 2020).  Personal essays and articles have been published by The Guardian, Vice and Wellcome Collection Stories.  In 2016 she won a Saboteur Award for her multi-sensory poetry installation Alchemy. In 2020 she was awarded a Artangel Thinking Time award in order to address the pandemic. She was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Award For Artists in 2021. Abi can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @abipalmer_bot.