Interview #131— Abdul-Rahman Abdullah

by Matt Chun

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s art practice explores the different ways that memory can inhabit and emerge from familial spaces. Abdullah aims to articulate physical dialogues between the natural world, politics and the agency of culture.

While his own experiences as a Muslim Australian of mixed ethnicity provide a starting point, Abdullah negotiates shared understandings of individual identity, new mythologies and marginalised outlooks in a multicultural context. Living and working in rural Western Australia, Abdullah provides a unique perspective across intersecting and disparate communities.

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah speaks to Matt Chun about unfolding crises, dead animals, and making art on the periphery.

While our creative practices are very different, we both work regularly with depictions of animals. In your case, through exquisitely carved wooden sculpture and installation. We are speaking in the wake of an environmental crisis that claimed an unprecedented number of animal lives and habitat. Have the fires impacted you personally, and will they inform you artistically?

I think we work closer than you might imagine, I see carving as drawing in space. In the same way that your beautiful mark-making and subtle building of colour creates form, I bang away the negative space and leave a marked and painted surface to create that same sense of form. I think that our whole lives have occurred during a period of mass extinction, but we’ve really started to see and feel it far more sharply, especially over this recent Australian summer period. While we’ve been lucky around Perth, not suffering fires to the same scale and devastation as the east coast, more than half the farm where I live was lost to fire in January. With a four week old baby and a toddler in tow, that was a time I won’t forget. It really clarifies your priorities when you’re chasing a wall of flames with a little fire unit, and your house is on the line. Nobody was injured and we didn’t lose any animals or buildings but it was really close.

To be completely honest I don’t really know how the loss of animals and habitats will inform my artistic output. One of the ironies I see is that so many of the animals that populate my work are a part of the problem. Introduced species like sheep, camels, chickens, foxes, water buffalo, cats and dogs offer so much scope for human engagement but also reflect the rapid degradation of the Australian environment since the colonial invasion and occupation of this country.

An absolutely harrowing experience. I’m so glad that you got through it unscathed. You mentioned the introduced species—these ‘reflections of colonisation’—that populate your work. I remember such animals featured in your Castlemaine State Festival exhibition last year – a collaboration with your partner, the talented artist Anna Louise Richardson. That show was an exploration of mortality, aptly titled Dead Things. Of course, as a children’s author, I’m obliged to consider the role of animals as anthropomorphised narrative archetypes, rather than subjects of natural history. Is this the role that animals play in your work?

That’s absolutely the role that animals play in my work, I see their presence as a reflection of human relationships and narratives. It’s funny that you mention this in relation to Dead Things, because while that particular show explored our experiences of animal mortality, much of it focused on the process of slaughtering animals, either for food or through the Australian trope of shooting Foxes and Kangaroos, and roadkill. We were looking at the death of animals at the hands of humans. It was really interesting for us to examine how our experiences overlapped.

Anna grew up on the farm where we now live, she has always identified with the land as a site of responsible production of animals for food. I come from a very urban environment and my encounters came through halal slaughter and backyard butchery, roadkill and shooting things. We have layered relationships with animals that are both cultural and economic, emotional and pragmatic, real and imagined, which is why they remain so pivotal in our work.

Quite often, our closest examination of animals, particularly wild ones, are when we encounter their corpses. Being the grotty, curious little boy I was, I poked them with sticks and inspected the gory details. I guess this falls somewhere between natural history and narrative archetypes, we’re all just characters in a scientific journal that keeps getting updated with better facts!

Yes, the urban/rural dichotomy is something that fascinates me too. It’s interesting that you identify it as a kind of matrix for your creative relationship with Anna. Like you, I’ve spent the last decade working from my home studio, in a regional context, a significant distance the city, and from city-based institutions. Have you found this challenging as a professional artist?

I live on a 3000-acre Beef Cattle property in the Peel region, just south of Perth. Anna’s family have been here for seven generations and I’ve lived here since we were married in 2016. I never thought that I’d live on a farm, it just wasn’t something within my orbit. But the space and serenity is unbelievable. My commute is a 50 metre walk across the backyard to the studio we built. I’m incredibly lucky to be able to live, work and raise a family in this environment, surrounded by the natural world. From my kitchen window I can see horses, alpacas, a few sheep, cows and a goat. I can hear chickens yodelling, birds chirping away, bulls bellowing, a toddler yelling and a baby gurgling. There’s definitely a few tiger snakes, dugites, redbacks and foxes lurking around too. Like I said… the serenity, ha.

As far as isolation goes, we’re only 45 minutes from the city centre so it’s the best of both worlds really. Having said that, Perth is the most isolated continental city in the world, so what’s another few kilometres when you already exist on the periphery. I have a very labour intensive, studio based practice, so having the space and clarity to work is far more important to me than proximity to tall buildings. The downside is the cost of freight and flying a lot for projects around Australia. So many West Australian artists move to bigger centres and I totally understand how the visibility benefits the exposure of their practice. But I also see the struggle to balance income and family life with high rent, limited work space and unlimited social space. Everything is a trade-off, but I think I’ve come out in front. As far as working with institutions, many of our best examples are in regional areas, just like many of Australia’s most significant artists live in the remotest parts of this country. I like to think of Australia as one big town and I just live in one of the outer suburbs, what’s 4000km between friends?

I see carving as drawing in space.

It seems to me that this sense of being on the ‘periphery’, whether geographically or otherwise, does resonate with the poetry of your sculpture. Thematically, your work has also been described as magic realism, and I’m curious to know how you feel about that literary label? Is it a creative and narrative tradition that you embrace?
From what I understand about the terminology and definition of magic realism, it’s absolutely something that I would apply to my own work. I don’t want to move beyond the idea of finding the magical in the mundane, communicating an outlook that accepts the world we think we understand as a part of something beyond our rational grasp. I try to create poetic encounters that are completely familiar, through realistic sculpture and scale, yet outside of our daily engagement with the world around us. We tick along as floppy, mostly liquid organisms, fired with electrons, imagination, intuition, innate spirituality, emotional resonance and a rambling inner dialogue that keeps us in touch with the natural world and the entities around us in ways that I wouldn’t even try to understand. We aren’t limited by what we can touch and see, it seems ridiculous but the actual experience of being human is mostly invisible to each other.

On that note, what are you reading at the moment?
Do audiobooks count? I’m ashamed to say that I never find the time to read real books anymore. I used to listen to a lot of non-fiction to try and educate myself while I work but recently I feel like I just want to be entertained, I think my attention span might be receding with my hairline. I’ve just been through every available Joe Abercrombie book, a good bit of nerd fantasy blood and guts never hurts.

I think audiobooks definitely count! What else are you listening to?
I like to listen to podcasts, my current favourite is Behind the Bastards. It’s super entertaining to hear about terrible people.

Haha. And as a contrast to terrible people, who are the people who inspire you?
I’m inspired by my family. My wife and daughters, siblings, parents, relatives and in-laws, as well as my ancestors who are always watching.

What do you do to relax?
I love cooking (and eating), going to the gym and playing with the kids, I think replenishment is more useful than relaxation. I also like to stare at my phone sometimes, mainly watching skating videos and boxing highlights.

Do you have any advice for emerging artists?
Charming, punctual and/or talented. I was once told that any two of these three traits will carry you a long way. The rest is just hard work. Also, check your emails and respond in a timely fashion, but I guess that falls under punctual.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
It’s like being part of an exclusive club full of smart people doing very cool things. Don’t tell anyone but there is an extended family of us in the art world who respect and support each other in ways that aren’t necessarily obvious to everyone else. Being Muslim is integral to that experience as well, linking my sense of identity to a broad slice of the world. I think that it’s a real privilege to feel so culturally porous, I can feel like I can belong anywhere and nowhere at once.

* * *

Abdul-Rahman, it has been a few weeks since our conversation, above. We now find ourselves within the critical moments of a global pandemic. Australia’s response to Covid-19 has been predictably negligent, and it seems we’re yet to experience the full impact. I’m just checking back in with you briefly, to see how this moment is affecting your life and practice.
The world is changing on a daily basis and we’re adapting as best we can. Today, it feels very surreal to look out the window and nothing seems to have changed, but all my upcoming projects have been cancelled or postponed. I’m looking at zero income for the foreseeable future, we’re watching the numbers grow and preparing to lock down. It sounds apocalyptic, but I feel very lucky that we’re in a good position to ride it out here on the farm, all of a sudden living on the periphery has never felt more appealing.

I really feel for the people who’ve lost jobs with mortgages and kids to feed, cooped up in stressful situations. We’re back to basics, but have plenty of room and it’s a beautiful place to spend more time with the kids at such a special age. I’ve got enough materials to keep working for a while, hopefully we’ve got enough savings to squeeze us through, we’re healthy, well stocked with the essentials and tomorrow I’ve got to find room in the freezers for three fat lambs. Farm life has its perks. I’m going to remain optimistic.