Nabilah Nordin

Lives and works in New York City, NY

Artist statement

Nabilah Nordin’s materially driven practice explores the formal possibilities and surface potential of sculpture. Her elaborate abstract works are unruly, interlacing calligraphic lines with voluminous masses in dense configurations. Beginning by welding steel armatures, Nordin exaggerates the physicality of her forms so that they seem to defy gravity, teetering on the edge of collapse and multiplying uncontrollably. She is primarily interested in expressing the physicality of tension – how sculpture can embody the underlying forces of natural phenomena, such as growth, depletion, decay, collapse, and entanglement. Her structures often appear precarious, propped up with stilts, scaffolds, and makeshift supports borrowed from the industrial world, interrupting the logic of their organic shapes. The surfaces of her sculptures are subjected to an expansive range of treatments, from 17th century faux-marble plaster and ancient lime clay techniques to automotive spray, oxidizing rust paint and bronze casting. When these methods are applied to her contorted forms, they produce contradictory visual logics, like knotted marble, or convulsing cement. Nordin persistently undermines the expectations of her chosen mediums, upending the material hierarchies and aesthetic values associated with her materials. Though the works may first evoke associations – weathered artefacts, complex machinery, or lyrical scriptures – these readings unravel upon closer inspection. By resisting familiar...

Artwork