Melbourne-based emerging artist Nabilah Nordin works though an understanding of materiality to create sensual and visceral abstract sculptures. With their oozy, drippy and rough surfaces Nordin’s sculptures are beguilingly playful, offering the viewer an encounter with fantastical, or seemingly impossible other worlds. Utilising non-traditional sculptural materials, and a process Nordin refers to as ‘unlearning’, the artist eschews tradition in an attempt to create her own idiosyncratic sculptural language.
Nordin’s work has been exhibited locally and internationally. Recently she has participated in the Singapore Biennale, group exhibitions at Artbank, the Institute of Modern Art, Neon Parc, The Commercial and Bundoora Homestead Art Centre. In 2020 Nordin was a finalist in the Churchie emerging artist award.
Nabilah Nordin is a Singaporean/Australian sculptor. Interested in material invention, her installations embrace wonky craftwork, playfully celebrating the visceral and anthropomorphic qualities of materials in concert with community engaged performative practices.
Cycles of construction and destruction characterise her studio process. Nordin ‘unlearns’ correct methods and techniques to maintain a state of conscious naïveté. She amplifies sculptural scraps and off-cuts, transforming them into parodies of monumental artefacts. They speak of unbridled ambition and impossible physical challenges. Her ever-expanding sculptural vocabulary strives for the slimy, slopping, seeping, slippery seduction of sensuous surfaces. Forms topple and collapse upon themselves in a nonsensical cacophony of ridiculous attempts to make sculpture. Nordin’s studio process draws on 'domestic' activities such as cooking, DIY construction, makeshift architecture or interior decoration, to conjure absurd monuments and amorphous environments.
Nordin completed a Master of Contemporary Art at Victorian College of the Arts in 2015, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT University in 2013. Solo exhibitions include Birdbrush and Other Essentials, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2021; Covergirl Adhesives, COMA Gallery, Sydney, 2020 and An Obstacle in Every Direction, Singapore Biennale, Singapore, 2019. Group shows include A thousand different angles, McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery, Melbourne, 2022; SIMMER, Murray Art Museum Albury, Albury 2021; Salient Features, Changwon Sculpture Biennale, South Korea, 2020; 1991, Neon Parc Brunswick, Melbourne, 2020 and Those Monuments Don’t Know Us, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Melbourne, 2019.
Nabilah Nordin is represented by Neon Parc.
@nabilahnordin
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