Dead Things brings together a suite of works by Anna Louise Richardson and Abdul-Rahman Abdullah in a conversation about the proximity of death in the natural world. Emerging from the intersection of cultural and environmental perspectives, the project explores encounters with animal mortality and the broader implications of death. While their personal outlooks emerge from distinct rural and urban contexts, a sense of domesticity frames the discussion within the shared experiences of childhood. Raveled into a particularly Australian sense of place, death often provides our closest encounter with the extant animal ecology, whether wild, domestic, native, or feral. Unpacking ideas of morbid curiosity, scarcity and abundance, nurture and slaughter, Dead Things invites audiences into the intimate spectacle of death.
Married since 2016, the artists live on a cattle property in Western Australia with their baby daughter Aziza, sharing a studio surrounded by a living environment. Although their lives are entwined, overlapping personally and professionally, Dead Things is the first time they’ve collaborated on a project that speaks to the common core of their respective practices.
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Anna Louise Richardson (b.1992) is an artist and independent curator investigating rural identity and associated mythologies. Living and working on a cattle farm south of Perth, Western Australia, her drawing and installation practice explores relationships with the natural world complicated by human intervention, intergenerational expectations, and the role of animals in culture, commerce, and ecology. Touching on the complex emotions and responsibilities of farming in rural Australia, Richardson’s work emphasizes how relationships to place and nature can be shaped through different histories, storytelling, and imagination.
Abdul-Rahman Abdullah (b. 1977) is an Australian artist whose practice explores the different ways that memory can inhabit and emerge from familial spaces. Drawing on the narrative capacity of animal archetypes, crafted objects, and the human presence, Abdullah aims to articulate physical dialogues between the natural world, identity, and the agency of culture. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, his work has been described as “magical realism,” creating poetic interventions with the space it occupies. While his own experiences as a Muslim Australian of mixed ethnicity provide a starting point, Abdullah foregrounds shared understandings of individual identity and new mythologies in a cross-cultural context. Living and working in rural Western Australia, he provides a unique perspective across intersecting and disparate communities.