Nabilah Nordin

Nabilah Nordin Amelia Winata

If modernity was predicated upon anything, it was upon a sense of certainty—a more or less positive, future-oriented principle. Pondering the legacy of modernist sculpture within our less certain times, Nabilah Nordin’s Backward Twist 2022 reshapes Inge King and Norma Redpath’s monumentality to suit the present day—combining the modernist logic of the monument with an undercurrent of precarity and humour.

As archetypes of Australian modernism, King and Redpath’s sculptures were created with a sense of rigour, as though declaring their intention to stand the test of time. Usually cast in bronze or steel and occupying very public spaces, these sculptures have in many cases long outlived the modernist dream, reminding viewers of the utopian ideals of decades gone.

In many ways, Nordin’s practice is the antithesis of King and Redpath’s sculpture. Those who are familiar with it will immediately think of her frenetic and bright, multi-piece installations that swell, like expanding foam, across entire rooms. Now presenting a single, large-scale sculpture, Nordin nonetheless continues within the convention of her previous work, combining cement, bronze and steel to produce a work of multiple elements that appear to be precariously collaged together.

The core theme of Backward Twist, something that the title suggests, is a simultaneous acknowledgement of and adjustment of standard conventions through the language of sculptural form. Indeed, Nordin began with bronze, what she calls the ‘inescapable bones of sculpture’ and, by proxy, modernism, to create a wing-like form—albeit a vestigial one. She then built the rest of the sculpture around this bronze wing. Slowly but surely, Nordin’s less ‘noble’, more contemporary materials—cement, steel—grew around the bronze element, almost superseding it. A few small sprouts of bronze emerge from the work’s base and uppermost tips, reminding the viewer of Nordin’s seed material. The flat and undeniably contemporary cobalt of the Backward Twist’s cement section is at odds with the penny bronze patina, but they manage to co-exist, even if awkwardly. There are plenty of such incongruities in Backward Twist: monumentality is fragility, the monolith becomes the aggregate, the monotone is replaced by colour. We might also consider the fact of Backward Twist’s resemblance to a chair and, therefore, its seeming utility. This utility is just as quickly refused by the acid green curved ‘handle’ placed in the centre of what would be the chair’s seat—signalling for the viewer to adjust their expectations.

Ultimately, what Nordin gives the viewer is a warping of expectations. Nordin acknowledges the unavoidable presence of traditional sculpture within contemporaneity while also adjusting it to suit our more heterogenous historical moment. Formally, the mismatched elements in Backward Twist play off traditional sculpture’s formal purity, adding a graphic visuality that modernist sculptors might have cried in the face of. We may have had to come to terms with the dissolution of the modernist dream (indeed, we have had several decades to come to terms with it), but all is not lost. Nordin offers a visual eyeful, captivating the viewer with playful humour. Rather than bury modernism she, instead, reveals the constant precarity of even the most outwardly steadfast moments in art history.