In the studio: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah

“. . . everything is a self-portrait.”


Working from his studio in rural Western Australia, Perth-born artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah explores life through his ‘magic realism’ style. Animals, mythology, and family history translate into artworks set in otherworldly installations that immerse the viewer. Abdullah offers a refreshing and honest take on his life as an artist, plus raising his three children in the bush.

Can you tell us more about your studio?
I love my studio so much. It’s my safe space to think, make and be utterly and shamelessly myself. My studio is about a fifty-metre walk across the lawn at the far end of our backyard, it’s a really nice commute. I share a 150sqm insulated shed with my wife and fellow artist Anna Louise Richardson, with a 65sqm veranda. We built it just before we got married in 2016 and divided it straight down the middle, although the kids have claimed the veranda as their play zone.

We also have an insulated container for crate storage and access to another workshop in the old shearing shed nearby with some big tools that belonged to Anna’s mum like a table saw, thicknesser, bandsaw etc. I don’t work under natural light, and I do a lot of carving at night so it’s the overhead LED’s that are my best friends in there. The space changes depending on what I’m working on, I move my workbenches around all the time. In the summertime I have a hardworking little air conditioner and in the winter I warm up on the tools pretty quick.

The studio faces onto the lawn on two sides and my nearest neighbours are in the bull paddocks on the other sides. I’m often working with a few tonnes of grunty beef out the window. They say the country life is peaceful but it gets super noisy here, there are so many birds yelling at each other all day, cows shouting at their kids and bulls arguing. We also have resident Bob Tails, Bandicoots, big old Goannas and unfortunately Rabbits in the backyard, as well as cattle, kangaroos, a couple of sheep, an Alpaca, snakes, possums, foxes, a billion insects and even the occasional Echidna around the place. I love it!

How does living in rural Western Australia influence your work? Family-life seems ever present on your Instagram; does this influence your practice as well?
I feel like I get to have my cake and go for seconds. We live on Anna’s family farm but it’s not too far away from the city. I’m a big fan of letting the world change you, because it’s going to anyway so you may as well be conscious of the process and make it positive. I never lived outside of a city before moving here and I was instantly in love with space, so much space. When you’re immersed and surrounded by the natural world you become much more aware of sharing it with so much life, nature is crawling with it, it’s so busy on a micro/macro/everything level.

My threshold of how many spiders is too many spiders had to take a steep climb though, sometimes I feel like my world is 35% spider and the rest is a mix of admin, art, food and children. Family life is everything. Our three squids Aziza (5), Althea (3) and Aqeel (18 months) pretty much dictate the pace, schedule, mood and extreme level of laundry that is our life. I figure that family is going to engulf every aspect of the daily rhythm so I may as well throw myself in and enjoy it, try to be good at it or at least survive with a smile. Being a parent is hard labour and I meet my own limits every single day but you can’t exactly get a refund on kids. I just fill my Instagram stories with snippets of kid life and my feed with work. Of course I try and make it all look fun and easy, nobody wants to see me yelling at my kids or my work. Like the old proverb goes – always choose to work with children and animals.

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah and family. Photograph: Bo Wong. Courtesy the artist

Your practice spans sculpture and installations, employing such realistic elements tinged with fantasy. When did you start working in this way?
I came to professional art practice at a relatively ripe age, graduating from Art School in 2012 when I was already a decrepit 34-year-old. In some ways I’d spent my entire life before that building skills that were going to be useful. I was an Illustrator, Christmas designer and model maker for many years, as well as designing and building animal habitats and sculptures for Perth Zoo. I also dropped out of four art schools along the way.

There were also many, many crappy jobs and tasks that kept me alive until I felt ready to become an artist and then I enrolled at VCA in 2010, attending for a year before coming back to Boorloo and finishing my degree at Curtin University. Drawing was always my core outlet until I started to sculpt for work in my mid twenties.

The nice thing about taking so long to become an artist was that I didn’t really evolve a visual language in the public eye, I kind of just popped out of art school with a good work ethic and happy hands. I figure if I just used those tools to tell the world the stories that I tell myself, I could probably be an artist. The biggest change I made to my processes was the decision to start carving wood in 2014. Also, I guess I became a bit obsessed with animals at some point.

With such deep and meaningful messages to your pieces, how do you come to the concepts behind your works?
More than anything, I feel like I’m a storyteller. It’s lovely to be described as deep and meaningful and like all healthy Leo’s I thrive on praise so please don’t stop, but I’m not sure if there are actually any messages hiding in my work. I feel like I sit at the intersection of a few different cultural spheres, I’m a bag of mixed truths and I like to shake it all up and see what fruit falls out. I pick a good apple, populate it with animal characters and hope people find their own reflection in it.

Now I’ve just given away my whole process. I’ve got a list of things that I want to make and the opportunities I get determine which ones make the most sense to get working on. I feel like artists are a bunch of weirdo superheroes with very impractical powers – one may smudge burnt sticks, another is great at shouting quietly, somebody maps sensation, someone else stares at a screen – I tell stories with bits of wood. I think that artists themselves are the concept behind their work and everything is a self-portrait.

What can we expect from your artwork in the TarraWarra Biennale?
I want to put you in a white cube with a big old saltwater crocodile. It’s a work called Tanpa Sempadan, it means without borders in Bahasa. I’ve left this one in raw wood, like a mythic white crocodile in the room. I feel like a crocodile claims its space, both literally and in the cultural imagination of human beings.

We see our human selves reflected in that sense of territorial violence, like two monsters sharing a puddle. I wanted to contribute my voice, and five months of my life, to that ongoing relationship. I’m a bit sick of carving scales to be honest, who would’ve thought that a giant reptile had so many!

My mum grew up in Malaysia with crocodiles in the river, and those stories leave teeth marks. This is what happens when you tell kids scary tales, they’re still getting it out of their system in their mid-forties.

What other projects do you have coming up?
I’m working on another project with Marrugeku up in Broome, it’s such a privilege to moonlight in that reality for a while, I’ve got a lot of respect for dancers and how much they give of themselves. I’ve also got a solo show titled Journeys opening at Linden New Art in St Kilda on March 18.

I’m very excited to share that building with two legends of Australian art – Nell and Kate Just. The cauldron is boiling for stuff in Brisbane, Sydney and more Melbourne stuff; cats and birds, maybe a goat, or at least its head, the usual menu. My plan is to somehow make more work in less time, feed the kids and have a good life doing it all.

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Tanpa Sempadan, 2023, wood, glass, 35 × 270 × 115cm. Photograph: Abdul-Rahman Abdullah

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah is represented by Moore Contemporary, Perth. His solo exhibition Journeys is on view at Linden New Art, Melbourne, until 4 June 2023.

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