Abdul-Rahman Abdullah Sculpting Spaces for Grief

Abdul is an artist working in sculpture and installation. He discusses his work Pretty Beach, inspired by a place of the same name on Brisbane Water north of Sydney where his grandfather lived in a former beach house. Abdul’s grandfather took his own life in 2009, an act that Abdul describes not as a tragedy but a choice he made as ill health deprived him of his self-sufficiency.

Abdul remembers visiting his grandfather and watching stingrays from the jetty until heavy rains came in across the bay, describing his sense of their permanence despite being obscured from view. In Pretty Beach, he applies this idea to his grandfather’s passing. He discusses death in the context of his Muslim faith, and the isolation that arises from our society’s inability to ‘do grief’.

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