Contemporary artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah has always seen family as his inspiration, and the Covid-19 lockdown has made it even more crucial.
I appreciate that I live in a privileged part of the world, yet it’s also a deeply belligerent, inherently bigoted and selfish country that continues to destroy the environment for profit, imprison asylum seekers and is unable to acknowledge the colonial framework of violence that still defines us. Australians have this self image of being relaxed and easy going but we are consumed by institutional racism, government corruption and hard-edged politics.
Please tell us a little about yourself. What brought you to the world of art and how did you start?
I’m a contemporary artist, working primarily in sculpture and installation, living and working in Mundijong, a rural area south of Perth, Western Australia. I identify as a Muslim Australian with a mixed background. My mother is Malay and my father is Anglo Australian. I live on a 3,000 acre beef cattle farm with my wife Anna, who is also an artist and independent curator, and our two daughters Aziza, aged two and Althea, aged four months. Anna’s family has been on the farm for seven generations and I have lived here since we were married in 2016. Growing up in a working class area of Perth, as part of a very small Muslim community I never really understood that art could be a profession. Art was for rich people. I filled my childhood with drawing and reading, and my teenage years with skateboarding, boxing and partying. My older brother Abdul-Karim had attended art school and after I left high school I started courses at several different universities and technical colleges, but always dropped out for a variety of bad reasons. It was the nineties and we didn’t really think much about the future.
While I continued to draw relentlessly and picked up some graphic design skills, I had lots of different jobs from labouring, factory work and selling paint before becoming an illustrator and commercial sculptor, eventually specialising in Christmas design, as well as designing and building zoo habitats and animal sculptures. It was a winding path but I always knew that it would lead to art. I saw these occupations in the commercial world as building skills and developing a work ethic as an independent contractor.
In 2010 I finally went back to complete a Bachelor of Art, first at the Victorian College of Arts before graduating from Curtin University in 2012 when I was 34 years old. Although I’ve been to five different art schools, it was only a small part of the process of becoming an artist. Life is the best educator and now with a family of my own, the lessons continue.
Pretty Beach. 2019.
How do you describe yourself in the context of challenging people’s perspectives via your work and art?
Being an artist in Australia comes with its own set of circumstances and challenges. I appreciate that I live in a privileged part of the world, yet it’s also a deeply belligerent, inherently bigoted and selfish country that continues to destroy the environment for profit, imprison asylum seekers and is unable to acknowledge the colonial framework of violence that still defines us. Australians have this self image of being relaxed and easy going but we are consumed by institutional racism, government corruption and hard-edged politics. In this country Muslims are regarded as foreign, despite my father’s family being here for over 200 years. My name and identity are always assumed as peripheral.
How do you deal with the conceptual difficulty and uncertainty of creating new work?
I generally work with fairly specific ideas in mind. Often the idea for a work has been bouncing around in my head for a few years before I get the opportunity to bring it to life. I feel like I have got many years worth of ideas that I’d love to pursue stacked away in the back of my mind.
The Dogs. 2017.
Let’s talk about the evolution of your practice over the years. Tell us about your commitment to your current medium.What would you call your style?
I’m now entering my eighth year of professional practice, so I don’t feel like I have an extensive trajectory to reflect on. The biggest shift for me was the decision in 2014 to start carving wood. Many of the processes I relied upon to that point were an extension of my time and experiences as a commercial sculptor, using oil-based or wet clay, lots of mould making, silicone and resins. There were some chemical processes that I needed to move away from, for my health, environmental reasons and the material relevance of my work.
The first thing I carved was a mouse during a workshop and then I carved a water buffalo. I think that if you can draw you can carve. It’s just another form of mark-making. I love the physicality of the process. It can be quite meditative but it’s not a good idea to lose yourself too much with a chainsaw or razor-sharp chisel in your hand. I’m resistant to the idea of ‘style’ when talking about art but I do understand how useful the terminology is. I’d describe it as “aestheticised realism” – it’s realistic in terms of proportion and scale, but simplified and stylized. I don’t mind revealing the structural elements of the work, allowing the flawed nature of the wood to show with laminated seams, gaps and patches. I want my work to be realistic enough to be accepted by audiences as part of the world around them before revealing the handcrafted nature of the object.
The Dogs. 2017.
Let’s talk about your frameworks, references and process. What inspires you?
I’m inspired by my family: my wife and children, my brothers and sister, parents, in-laws and my ancestors. They’re all a part of my work in some way.My work has been described as magic realism, creating poetic interventions and unexpected encounters within the built environment. I explore aspects of traditional woodcraft in a contemporary context, allowing for new modes of storytelling and placing audiences in the presence of a living, subjective history within the everyday. The idea of family provides a framework for my creative practice, drawing on childhood memories of growing up as a Muslim kid in suburban Australia, exploring my ancestry in Malaysia and Indonesia, and how the idea of family can be complicated by different definitions and contexts from the domestic, biological unit to broader communal, social or political frameworks.
The presence of animals is fundamental to my visual language. Animals have the capacity to move between domestication and wildness, serenity and violence, intuition and logic, interior and exterior embodied within a physicality that is both familiar and foreign.
How does your audience interact and react to your work?
The longer I can hold the attention of strangers, the more successful I feel a work is. Honestly, I think most people who actually engage with my work would stop, stare at it for a bit, move around it to get different views, read the wall text, hopefully photograph the work and the text, and tell people what they thought. It’s one of the funny things about artists and audiences – we’re mostly not there to see the response. I know how I want people to react, but I really don’t know.
Everything Is True. 2015.
What are you looking for when you look at other artists’ work? Which shows, performances and experiences have shaped your own creative process? Who are your maestros?
I love the work of so many artists. I love how people approach the world in ways that I could never imagine. What I look for and engage with most is when I think an artist’s work is genuine. Whether it’s political, traumatic or a deeply spiritual connection, pure formalism, manipulations of light, sound and colour, bespoke craft, raw emotion, material statements or gaudy decoration. I want to experience a story of some kind, a fragment or something epic, something that doesn’t rely on words. I gravitate towards warmth.
I like to think of my favourite artists in terms of those I know or have at least met. They include Lisa Reihana, Abdul Abdullah, Vernon Ah Kee, Lindy Lee, Khadim Ali, Megan Cope, Khaled Sabsabi, Rebecca Baumann, Dale Harding, Anna Louise Richardson, Eko Negroho, Yhonnie Scarce, Richard Bell, Patricia Piccinini, Jason Phu, Caroline Rothwell, Curtis Taylor, Richard Lewer, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, Alex Seton, Marikit Santiago, Vipoo Srivilasa and Ramesh Nithiyendran. I could just keep going…
Artists often experience contradicting motivations between the commercial and the creative. How do you strike a balance? How does your interaction with a curator, gallery or client evolve?
I think it’s a mistake see a duality or contradiction between creativity and commercial outcomes. I absolutely need to sell work to survive but it’s never the motivation for being an artist. I feel like we don’t really get a choice with the work we make, it’s just what happens. I’m just really glad that I tend towards objects which can be sold. It’s always the idea that makes work and if you can deliver that idea in a way that’s genuine, interesting and archival then it will have a chance at selling. My gallerist is open to whatever I want to do with my practice. A good relationship is having faith in the rigour of your allies, choosing them well and letting them do what they do best.
The men who sold lies. 2018.
What was your first sale? Do you handle the commercials yourself or is it outsourced to a gallery or an agent?
My first sale was from my first solo exhibition in an art-run-initiative in Perth called Kurb in 2012, at the very beginning of my third year of study at Curtin University. Before the show opened a work was bought by Desi Litis. She was the director of a commercial gallery called Venn and she ended up representing me for a time. I’m currently represented by Moore Contemporary here in Perth, Western Australia.
How many works do you make in a year? How many would you like to be making?
It varies, depending on the larger projects I’m working on. I think it’s around 10 works a year. I don’t really want to make any more or less than that.
Think of the biggest professional risk you have taken. What helped you take that risk?
I think it was the decision to become a full-time artist one year after graduating from the university. I was self-employed for many years and continued to work in Christmas design as a contractor throughout my studies and for a year following. I think it’s really important to be able to apply yourself as a professional artist, to commit your entire brain, time and working capacity to your practice. In early 2014, I secured a public art commission that enabled me to stop drawing an income outside of art. It’s always a huge risk diving into an industry without consistency or safety nets but I’ve managed to stay afloat. It’s a constant hustle but that’s part of being an artist.
To dream a good luck dream. 2019.
What is the best piece of advice you have received? Why was it helpful?
A friend of mine who is an amazing artist and boxing coach, Richard Lewer, told my brother Abdul Abdullah and I that he always asks himself the question when he finishes a work: So what? He asks himself why anyone would care about the work and why should it exist. If he doesn’t have an adequate answer then the work has failed. It’s a very simple question but it can be brutal to answer honestly, especially to oneself. My brother has the question tattooed on his thumb. I don’t want to make work without a reason so I ask myself this question all the time.
Tell us about your studio. Could you describe your usual work day in the studio?
We built a studio on the farm when we moved here in 2016. It’s an insulated zincalume building with 150 sqm of floors pace and another 64 sqm of veranda. We divided it in half and share the space. Anna works mainly in large scale drawing and my half is full of benches, shelves, tools, wood, a very random assortment of stuff, sawdust and works in progress. The studio is about 50 m behind our house, so it’s only a short walk across the lawn to work, which is something I really appreciate. It’s quite an idyllic setting. From the studio I can see the bull paddock with a bunch of big boys arguing, lots of trees, my pet goat Trevor, fruit trees and the chicken coop. On the other side of the studio is an old shearing shed that has been converted into a workshop with larger tools like a table saw, drill press, band saw etc. It belonged to Anna’s mother Megan Christie. She was an amazing artist and furniture maker as well.
Our days are a dictated a lot by the needs of the children, when we have babysitting or daycare and whether we need to go out for any number of reasons. We try to co-parent as much as possible but Anna definitely has them more than I do and I try and make up for that in other ways. From 5.00 I’ll hang out with the family and most of the time I’ll cook dinner. I love cooking and think that it’s a really important part of family life. Hopefully the kids are in bed by 7.30 and Anna and I get to spend some time together. A few nights a week I’ll go back to the studio from about 9.00 to 11.00 pm as well. It’s a lovely time to work but not every day, unless I have a looming deadline. We try and keep the weekends for family time, visitors and doing jobs around the house and the farm. Every day is very full and I love the life I get to lead. This current state of Coronavirus has thrown everything into disarray however. I feel very lucky that we’re able to insulate ourselves from the world here, our closest neighbour is about 4km away and we eat a lot of home grown produce, but I have no idea how we’ll earn a living now that everything has been cancelled. We have each other though and more time to spend with the kids!
Practical Magic. 2016.
Are you more of a studio artist or naturally collaborative by nature? How do you feel about commissions?
I’m definitely a studio artist. My studio is where the physical works happens and to me it’s an extension of the home. Collaboration occurs in very specific ways, particularly between curator and artist but when it comes to the work itself it’s just me. I don’t mind the idea of commissions and I’m always happy to talk, although I haven’t had the best experiences so it’s not something I actively pursue.
What are you working on now? What’s coming next season?
I’m just finishing a major work for a project that I’m very excited about. The project is called The Diaspora Pavilion 2 – I am a beating heart in the world, co-curated by Mikala Tai (4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney and Adelaide Bannerman and Jessica Taylor (International Curators Forum, London). It’s intended as a series of events beginning in Sydney this year, followed by projects in London and Venice, 2021.
Is there any topic lately that you would like to be mentored on?
This might sound odd but I’d really like to be mentored in building better crates. I make them well enough for domestic freight but I want to be able to make them well enough for international shipping.
For enquiries contact: info@moorecontemporary.com
Before you go – you might like to browse our Artist Interviews. Interviews of artists and outliers on how to be an artist. Contemporary artists on the source of their creative inspiration.
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