Nuha Saad works in the areas of sculpture and public art. Saad has exhibited extensively in both solo and curated exhibitions in institutional and commercial galleries and a number of these exhibitions are highlighted below.
ROUND
Wollongong Art Gallery June 30 – September 17 2023
Round is an artist-led exhibition by mid-career artists whose practices include painting, sculpture, construction, installation and video, incorporating diverse media, materials and colour. The artists’ work examines ‘roundness’—exploring interpretations of circularity, curvature, bending— through exploration of shape, space and colour. Round highlights the problems, questions and answers of individual art practice, whilst collectively reflecting broader themes and subjects of popular culture, current affairs and global politics.
Artists: Andrew Christofides, Richard Dunn, Lynne Eastaway, Daniel Hollier, Pollyxenia Joannou, Lisa Jones, Tom Loveday, Hilarie Mais, Dani Marti, Al Munro, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Jacky Redgate and Nuha Saad.
Coordinated by Lisa Jones and Tom Loveday.
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Round (pdf)
Artwork details: The Folly of Purple, Orange and Blue 2023
Acrylic on wood, 2 posts: 180 (h) x 25 x 25 cm & 160 (h) x 25 x 25 Photo credit: Richard Glover Photography
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RAZZLE DAZZLE CHROMA
James Makin Gallery Melbourne VIC June 18 – July 3 2022
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On a recent visit to a historic submarine base in Sydney, Nuha Saad came across an infographic that explained the ‘razzle dazzle’ naval camouflage technique. This was a military practice used during WWI, whereby ships were painted in bold geometric patterns in order to camouflage them and to ‘dazzle’ an enemy submarine commander’s perception of a ship’s size and shape. ‘Razzle dazzle’ made ships a harder target to hit, not only by a passive concealing of the vessel, but by a defensive strategy to mislead and confuse.
The practice of ‘razzle dazzle’ resonated with Saad, who imagined such towering walls of metal painted like mobile artworks, gliding through water in bold patterns. Outside of a naval military context, additional definitions of razzle dazzle as ‘a confusing or colourful often gaudy action or display’ and ‘impressively opulent or decorative’ were equally appealing inspirations for Saad’s exhibition Razzle Dazzle Chroma. This exhibition continues the artist’s practice, which celebrates and highlights the myriad attitudes towards the ornamental, the architectural, the decorative and the colourful.
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Razzle Dazzle Chroma (pdf)
MEDIA
Artguide 17 June 2022. Structures of Colour
By Briony Downes
Artist Profile 59 Issue, An Archaeology of the Suburbs
By Courtney Kidd
WOMEN IN ABSTRACTION
ANZ Gallery Melbourne VIC September 2 – October 28
Artists: Angela Brennan, Eleanor Louise Butt, Leslie Dumbrell, Emma Coulter, Lara Merett, Judy Millar, Nuha Saad, Antonia Sellbach, Noël Skrzypczak, Wilma Tabacco, Kate Tucker and Rebecca Wallis
Curated by Camille Klose for James Makin Advisory
Women in Abstraction presents work by contemporary female artists working across the various fields of abstraction. Featuring work by Australian and New Zealand artists, the exhibition spotlights the remarkable contributions of contemporary female abstractionists to antipodean art history – and, indeed, art history at large.
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Women in Abstraction (pdf)
By Laura Kirkham
Sydney Contemporary at Galerie pompom
Galerie Pompom Sydney NSW November 3 – 21 November, 2021
Nuha Saad and Hayley Megan French
Exhibiting side by side for the first time, Sydney-based artists Hayley Megan French and Nuha Saad grace our front exhibition space with a presentation of new paintings and sculptures where the colours, shapes and forms of Australian suburbia are enlivened. Shifting between abstraction and representation the flat compositions and sculptural forms featured in the exhibition highlight the architectural and ornamental elements of our surroundings, beyond the functional, to reflect on notions of locality, community and home.
THE FOLLY OF COLOUR
Galerie Pompom Sydney NSW February 10 to March 14, 2021
Nuha Saad works with optimism and a modernist inheritance turning to colour and abstraction in a time of uncertainty and upheaval. Saad’s work identifies with both western art training and an eastern sensibility. The works exhibited in The Folly of Colour demonstrate the feeling of being in-between different cultural experiences. In the exhibition eastern forms bump up against the hard geometries of minimalist and formalist tendencies alike, but in a gentle way. One side supports the other, completes it and balances it formally.
(Michele Beevors, Principal Lecturer: Sculpture and Ceramics, Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic).
More exhibition details here
EXHIBITION ESSAY
The Folly of Colour (pdf)
By Michele Beevors, Principal Lecturer: Sculpture and Ceramics, Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic
ORNAMENTAL FANCIES
Galerie pompom Sydney NSW 2 – 27 October, 2019
For Nuha Saad the mix of Sydney formalism, colonial architectural details, and the post-pop colours of a commodity driven culture is informed by multicultural discourse. The flavour of antipodean formalism is confronted in a direct way and democratised by the play of colour on object, and the repurposing of found materials. Saad inherited the high design principles of De-stijl and the Bauhaus, the logic of the Fibonacci series, but the decoration of the iconoclast has been turned in the service of community meeting points, parks and school yard playgrounds in a vast array of public works and sculptures … Saad alludes reflexively to a new era for the expression of post-colonial discourses by highlighting marginalised and overlooked spaces and objects which is positive, complete and optimistic. (Michele Beevors 2019).
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Antipodean formalism and post-pop (pdf)
By Michele Beevors, Principal Lecturer, Dunedin School of Art Otago Polytechnic.
STOPPING BY THE COLOUR WHEEL (A Fabulation of Three Artists)
Grace Cossington Smith Gallery Sydney NSW May 15 to June 5, 2021
Artists: Nuha Saad, Sherna Teperson and Elefteria Vlavianos
In Stopping by the Colour Wheel (A Fabulation of Three Artists), Nuha Saad, Sherna Teperson and Elefteria Vlavianos take delight in responding to each other’s work — exploring the vibrational and sensate relationships between their specific art practices.
In this exhibition, the artists play with syntax and colour relationships that have evolved through considered juxtaposition, serendipity and play. While most works are authored individually, the installation is the result of many sessions of prior collaborative investigation. The architectural embellishments of the gallery’s four exhibition spaces have also played into this collaboration, and reveal surprising relationships between colour and form, as they also consider the material /immaterial porous boundaries within this exhibition.
THE HOME
Hazelhurst Regional Gallery Sydney NSW August 29 to November 8, 2020
Artists: Catherine O’ Donnell, Christopher Zanko, Kevin Mckay, Lucy O’Doherty, Nuha Saad, Tracey Clement
Curator: Carrie Kibbler
THE HOME is an exhibition of contemporary works that celebrate suburbia and the home. The Home has been curated to complement Art Deco from the National Collection: The World Turns Modern. The exhibition features the work of six contemporary artists whose works are influenced by architecture and suburbia and who were commissioned by Hazelhurst to produce new works responding to the theme of Art Deco.
Exhibition Catalogue
The Home (pdf)
KALEIDOSCOPE
Jody Kahlon + Nuha Saad
Jody Kahlon 1066 Glenhuntley Rd, Glenhuntley Melbourne VIC March 2020
KALEIDOSCOPE is a creative collaboration between Melbourne fashion designer Jody Kahlon and Sydney artist Nuha Saad. Together, they have created a bold theatrical work, where fashion meets sculpture, colour and optimism!
MEDIA RELEASE
Jody Kahlon X Nuha Saad Collaboration Media Release (pdf)
TOM BASS SCULPTURE PRIZE FINALIST SYDNEY NSW 2020 AND
DEAKIN UNIVERSITY SMALL SCULPTURE PRIZE FINALIST MELBOURNE VIC 2018, 2019
Nuha Saad was pleased to be a finalist in the Tom Bass Sculpture Prize in 2020 and the Deakin University Small Sculpture Prize in 2018 and 2019.
THEN AND NOW
Nuha Saad + Michele Beevors
Articulate Projects Sydney NSW 6 – 21 October, 2018
The exhibition Then and Now addresses the shifts in working methodologies over many years of encounters between two artists, Michele Beevors and Nuha Saad who met while sharing a studio at art college.
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Then and Now (pdf)
By Michele Beevors, Principal Lecturer, Dunedin School of Art Otago Polytechnic.
MEDIA
Artlink 09 Nov. 2018. Then and Now | Making : Memory
By Craig Judd
(Nuha) Saad employs the inescapable materiality of scale and proportion, the richly potent disjunction of hand-coloured architectural trim and flocked wallpaper in I Walk the Line III (1998–2018) as a riposte to Richard Serra’s Prop series (began 1969) and the masculinist bombast inherent in much of his work. The Colour of Dreams (2018) elegantly encapsulates how in the everyday we negotiate past and present, the handmade and machine-made, the demands of industrial-based standardised modes of living, and the continuing appeal of modernist ideals as represented by the miniature architectonic fantasy of pure colour and form… more
1717 PAINTING/NOT PAINTING
Galerie pompom Sydney NSW 22 November – 16 December, 2017
Artists: Kevin Chin; Will Cooke; Fernando do Campo; Stefan Dunlop; Neil Haddon; Irene Hanenbergh; Brent Harris; Matthew Harris; Daniel Hollier; Belem Lett; Ollie Lucas; Tara Marynowsky; Nuha Saad; Kate Tucker; Megan Walch; Tricky Walsh and Ian Williams.
Curator: George Adams
EXHIBITION ESSAY
The persistence of painting (pdf)
By Melissa Loughnan Founding director of Utopian Slumps and author of Australiana to Zeitgeist: An A to Z of Australian Contemporary Art.
MEDIA
Altmedia 28 Nov. 2017. 1717 Painting/not painting
By Rita Bratovich.
FABSTRACTION
Flinders Street Gallery Sydney NSW 12 July 12 – 4 August, 2018
Artists: Grace Burzese, Sophie Clague, Michael McIntyre, Ali Noble and Nuha Saad
Curator: Ali Noble
The constructions and assemblages in FABSTRACTION are characterised by an improvisational sensibility and offbeat rhythm, the artists’ knowledge of materials merge with inventive studio experimentation resulting in energetic and idiosyncratic works. Grace Burzese, Sophie Clague, Michael McIntyre, Ali Noble and Nuha Saad share their personal dialogues with painting, steel, paper, fabric and wood, demonstrating that the possibilities of abstraction remain an open ended and dynamic conversation. (Ali Noble 2018)
OUR HOUSE
Grace Cossington Smith Gallery Sydney NSW 26 July – 16 August, 2017
Artists: Tania Alexander, Victoria Lobregat and Nuha Saad
Exhibition Co-ordinated by Lisa Jones
A house contains and surrounds us. It provides both a physical space and a cultural space where we develop personal and social rituals and relationships. Tania Alexander, Victoria Lobregat and Nuha Saad explore the psychological complexities of our house through their interactions with colour, pattern and form.
The exhibition was opened by Annalisa Capurro ‘Ms Modernism’ – Annalisa Capurro Interior Designer | Design Educator| Architectural & Design Historian| Architectural Photographer | Writer
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Our House (pdf)
STABLE
Articulate Project Space Sydney NSW 19 November – 3 December, 2016
Artists: Kath Fries, Fiona Kemp, Danica Knezevic and Nuha Saad
STABLE connotes many things including mental, physical, environmental, elemental stability and instability; or a bringing together – as in a stable of artists. These ideas are explored in STABLE, a group exhibition by Kath Fries, Fiona Kemp, Danica Knezevic, and Nuha Saad, who all share mutual interests in exploring both the conceptual and material qualities of their practices, working with site-responsive, experimental and embodied processes.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Stable (pdf)
PARAMOR ART+ INNOVATION PRIZE FINALIST 2017
This artwork The Sun Cast Shadows of a Nostalgic View, was also exhibited as part of the Paramor Art + Innovation Prize. Originally launched in 2015 in memory of Wendy Paramor, one of Australia’s most loved and celebrated contemporary female artists, the prize aims to honour innovative and forward-thinking artistic practices.
MEROOGAL WOMEN’S ART PRIZE FINALIST 2016
Meroogal Nowra NSW 24 September 2016 – 28 January, 2017
Nuha Saad was thrilled to be a finalist in the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize 2016 with her work Flock Fall. Meroogal is one of Sydney Living Museums’ 12 historic houses and museums. Once home to the Thorburn and MacGregor families, the property still overflows with their belongings, from favourite books and ornaments to furniture, photographs, diaries and journals. The Meroogal Women’s Art Prize invites artists to create works that respond to Meroogal house and its history and collection of treasures, throwing new light on the personal stories of the four generations of women who lived there.
GLITTER IS GOING UNDER 2015
Nuha Saad + Ali Noble
Airspace Projects Sydney NSW 4 – 19 September 2015
The original intent of our collaboration began as a mutual tension within our practices between ornament and minimalism, or ‘Ornaminimalism’. We aimed for reductive abundance and discovered decorative reduction. Certainly not Rococco and definitely not Minimalism. (Ali Noble 2015)
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Gliiter is Going Under! (pdf)
By Ali Noble
THE NECESSITY OF ORNAMENT
James Dorahy Project Space Sydney NSW 6 September – 2 October 2011
Nuha Saad’s new exhibition continues her playful investigations into colour and form. Saad works in between assemblage, painting and sculpture, combining ready‐made objects and colour in inventive configurations.
EXHIBITION ESSAY
The Necessity of Ornament (pdf)
By Dr Jacqueline Millner
reSATURATEryb
Grace Cossington Smith Gallery Sydney NSW 1 November – 6 December 2014
Artists: Julia Davis, Lisa Jones, Stephen Little, Tom Loveday, Jonny Niesche, Nuha Saad, Nike Savvas and Mark Titmarsh
Curator: Nicholas Tsoutas
reSATURATEryb, a group exhibition exploring the relationship between coloured objects and coloured spaces…the curator, Nicholas Tsoutas, has selected the three main exhibition spaces in the gallery to each correspond to the Modernist or Bauhaus division of colour into primaries: red, yellow and blue. Rather than a simply being a technical aspect of art, colour is revealed as an active critical device in the production and reception of contemporary art. reSATURATEryb, claims a spatial impact for saturated colour, freeing the colour from the surfaces of the room and allowing it to be in the space and not simply on the surfaces that define the space.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
reSATURATEryb (pdf)
By Nicholas Tsoutas
VELVET NOSTALGIA – WOOLLAHRA SMALL SCULPTURE PRIZE (FINALIST) 2010
Woollahra Sydney NSW
In Velvet Nostalgia (2010), Nuha Saad has created a poignant work through the striking contrast of sinuous, pastel balusters and a bright column of button‐like forms. The contrast creates what could be a dialogue between the almost‐there, diaphanous nature of memory, and the concrete insouciance of childhood. While here the architectural elements take on a figurative quality, the formal questions of the relationship between colour, form and narrative are still centre stage. (Dr Jacqueline Millner, Associate Prof. La Trobe University, Melbourne).
MEDIA
The Sydney Magazine – issue no. 101 September 2011
By Michael Fitzgerald (Editor Art Monthly)
There is a shy beauty with the work of Nuha Saad that melts before our eyes. At first we are lured by the pastel patterns her jigsaw puzzle-like sculptures make. Then we notice the individual pieces are old architectural remnants, such as dowels, finials and mouldings, and an emotional trip switch is triggered – evoked in such works as Velvet Nostalgia (2010) – which gradually brings these wonderfully introverted sculptures out of their shells.
IMAGINED CONSTELLATIONS
James Dorahy Project Space Sydney NSW 29 September – 18 October 2009
MEDIA
Concrete Playground Nuha Saad: Imagined Constellations
By Genevieve O’Callaghan
James Dorahy Project Space presents Nuha Saad: Imagined Constellations. Saad is interested in form and colour, order and repetition. Continually interrogating domestic space, the Sydney-based artist’s past work has incorporated the finer details of the home, like cornices and skirting boards, commenting on the trimmings we add to the necessities. Imagined Constellations features a series of wooden blocks, some painted, some not. The poetry is in their constellation – patterns and forms emerge from Saad’s placement of the pieces, and also from the wood itself. The cross section of the wood is like a thumbprint, at once individual and universal. As the title suggests, the arrangement of the forms here are guides to something greater in our universe.
ARTSPACE 24/25 : TWENTY FOUR ONE HOUR EXHIBITIONS
Artspace Sydney NSW 1 – 2 November 2008
Artists: Jim Allen, Brook Andrew, Denis Beaubois, Mark Brown, Katthy Cavaliere, Domenico de Clario, Julian Dashper, Elizabeth Day, Richard Dunn, Mikala Dwyer, Deej Fabyc, Matthys Gerber, Joan Grounds, The Kingpins, Derek Kreckler, Wade Marynowsky, Mike Parr, Eugenia Raskopoulos, r e a, Julie Rrap, Nuha Saad, Jill Scott, George Tillianakis, and Mark Titmarsh
Curator: Blair French
Twenty-four one-hour exhibitions. Twenty-five years of Artspace. Twenty-four artists presented one-hour solo exhibition projects. Accumulatively Artspace 24/25 provided an opportunity to engage with a diversity of contemporary practices – installation, performance, moving image, sculpture, photography, new media and painting. In keeping with twenty-five years of commitment to artistic experimentation, Artspace 24/25 treated the gallery as an active working space, a place in which artists think, intuit, experiment and make.
MEDIA
Contemporary Visual Art + Culture Broadsheet 38.1 2009 24 Exhibitions for 25 years (pdf)
By Bruce Barber
THE NEW CITY BEAUTIFUL PROJECT
James Dorahy Project Space Sydney NSW 11 – 30 September 2007
Nuha Saad explores the relationship between architecture and space in relation to contemporary theories surrounding abstraction and sculpture. Her highly coloured works painted in complex secondary and tertiary colour schemes investigate the inter-relationships between space and form, colour and ornamentation. She works in a poetic and speculative way while engaging with discourses of abstraction, aesthetics, memory and identity.
HARDWARE
University of Technology Sydney Gallery 11 September – 13 October 2006
Artists: Paul Donald, John Nicholson, Nuha Saad, Huseyin Sami, Mimi Tong, Mark Titmarsh
Exhibition cordinated by Nuha Saad
Hardware brings together six Sydney artists working in the junction between sculpture and painting. These artists consider the relationship between the physical matter that forms a work, and the ‘matter’ (or idea) that informs it. Hardware investigates the role of materiality in the process of art making and tests the limits of what can be called painting.
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Hardware (pdf)
Essay by Mark Titmarsh, Lecturer, School of Design University of Technology Sydney
PATTERNED SPACE
Esa Jaske Galleries Sydney NSW 17 May to 1 June 2 2006
She is a pattern of domestic virtues, whilst wielding drop-saw and nail gun. Of being good and causing damage with a router, railing against the same. These are tendencies executed upon the surface of wood, carpet, wallpaper, cloth etc – you know the drill; the daily, alkaline grind now, here, as coloured shapes with an outrageous hue here and there. Incongruous and formed, this is sculpture as practiced audaciously and painterly. She knows the orbital of making things and the consequences of new forms within fields of view and, so it is, here, her persistent, exacting and occasionally exorbitant blade transposes domestic sense-impressions and restrained architectural practice to form Patterned Space. (Exhibition Essay by Daniel Grafton)
OUR LUCK COUNTRY
Hazelhurst Regional Gallery NSW
Our Lucky Country (different) 9 December 2006 to 4 February 2007 and
Our Lucky Country (still different) 8 December 2007 to February 3 2008
Artists: Ron Adams, Liam Benson and Manizé Abedin, Maria Cruz, Elizabeth Day in collaboration with Margaret Day, Sarah Goffman,
Michelle Hanlin, Newell Harry, Ruark Lewis, Adam Norton, Nana Ohnesorge, Anna Peters, Nuha Saad, Huseyin Sami, Soda_Jerk,
George Tillianakis, Mimi Tong
Curators: George + Ron Adams
For Our Lucky Country, Saad has used her explorations of the relationship between colour, territory and cultural identity to consider what happened in Cronulla in December 2005. Colour is not only a racial signifier; it also plays a large role in designations of territory and identity, being one of the key elements of maps and, of course, national flags, where the emotive power of colour is mobilised with particular virulence. Saad brings all these associations together in her attempt to ‘re-map’ the site of the riots, to go over the territory, to symbolically shift the violent energies that had cathected onto those places that for many had held fond memories. Her large drawings, executed on tracing paper to capture the sense of a non-ending process of addition and erasure that can be approached from either side, represent a revised and revisited Cronulla, where the past is still visible but does not hold the future captive. Rendered in the colours of both the Lebanese and the Australian flags, Saad’s ‘map’ offers an alternative view of this territory, as a space of possibility and contingency. This Cronulla is a place where cultural identity is not fixed and instantly identifiable, but supple and nuanced, not unlike Saad’s own experience of growing up Australian.
(Dr Jacqueline Millner)
EXHIBITION ESSAYS
Our Luck Country (different) 2006 (pdf)
By Daniel Mudie Cunningham
Our Lucky Country (still different) 2007 (pdf)
Edited by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Essay by Dr Jacqueline Millner (Nuha Saad pg. 17)
A DIFFERENT GROUP
Gitte Weise Gallery Sydney NSW 28 July – 28 August 2004
Artists: included Paul Donald, Sarah Robson, Nuha Saad, Sherna Teperson
Curators: Gitte Weise and Alexie Glass-Kantor
INTERSECTING GEOMETRIES
Nuha Saad + Mimi Tong
Artspace Sydney NSW 3 to 26 March 2005
Nuha Saad and Mimi Tong are artists who normally work independently, and are here working together for the first time. They share an interest in architecture or building details, or at least what can happen in or be made to happen to spaces. (Professor Richard Dunn)
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Nuha Saad + Mimi Tong: Intersecting Geometries (pdf)
By Professor Richard Dunn
MEDIA
Art Monthly May 2006. Shapes of inhabitation: Painting in the Expanded Field (pdf)
By Mark Titmarsh, Lecturer, School of Design University of Technology Sydney
GLACIER
RMIT Gallery Melbourne VIC 13 September – 20 October 2001
Glacier is an exhibition that presents a range imaginative ways contemporary artists are exploring new possibilities for painting such as using technology to explode traditional boundaries. The artist’s apply variable tools, including digital technology, sculptural paintings, photography and light to the traditional craft of painting.
NUHA SAAD’s work is developed specifically in response to the architectural details such as cornices or skirting boards which focus and shape the way we experience the interiors of buildings. In Victory Ace (2001) installed above the reception desk in the entrance to the RMIT Gallery she has used ordinary skirting boards painted in lurid orange, blue, purple and sari pink in an attempt to redefine the spatial coordinates of an area already heavily determined by the architect’s aggressive use of colour. (Prof. Linda Williams RMIT, From Catalogue Essay: Reflections and Reconstruction: New Directions in Australian Painting)
Artists: Chris Bond, Judith Duquemin, Craig Easton, Claire Firth – Smith, Juan Ford, Mark Galea, Helga Groves, Stephen Haley, David Harley, Kieran Kinney, Amanda Marburg, Mark Misic, Nuha Saad, Carmen Soraya, Darren Wardle, Irene Wellm and Wang Zhiyuan
Curators: Suzanne Davies and Darren Wardle
THAT WAS THEN THIS IS NOW
Gitte Weise Gallery Sydney NSW 30 May – 30 June 2001
Artists: included Simon Cavanough, Dani Marti, Mel O’Callaghan, Nuha Saad, Kurt Schranzer, Tim Silver, Paul White
Curator: Alexie Glass-Kantor
MEDIA
Sydney Morning Herald (Galleries), June 6 2001. ‘When junk’s no longer rubbish’
By Courtney Kidd
Sydney Morning Herald (Exhibitions Metro), June 22 2001. ‘Weird Science’
By Victoria Hynes
MNCBM
Artspace Sydney NSW 2 November – 20 December 2000
Artists: Mimi Tong, Nuha Saad, Carmen Soraya, Beata Geyer and Monika Tichacek
Curator: Nicholas Tsoutas and Jacqueline Phillips
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
MNCBN Catalogue Fluid Geometries (pdf)
Essay by Tanya Peterson
GRAVITY FAILS
First Draft Gallery Sydney NSW August 2 – August 12 2000
Artists: Beata Geyer, Nuha Saad, Yvette Linton Smith, Kay Wood
SEDAN ACE PROJECT 20001
Nuha Saad + Kay Wood
Room 35 @ Gitte Weise Gallery and Block Projects Sydney NSW
The Sedan Ace project of Nuha Saad and Kay Wood reflected upon the domestic realm and the instability of relationships that reside within.
Spatial notation is the order of the day for Nuha Saad, who investigates the relationship between the viewer and their occupancy of a space. Saad steers herself through the unfamiliar by processes of counting and plotting points, the most planar of objects becoming the marked coordinates for her course. Through the collation and fine-tuning of such calculations, the reconfiguration of peripheral objects, in this case architectural trim, forces them into a position of prominence. The resulting works detail a system in which order, ornamentation and repetition serve to map out an environment of seemingly veiled explorations, courses and trajectories deciphered from the routinely fixed objects of domestication and aestheticism, in her consideration of the domestic house as a theatrical site,
Wood’s re-staging of domestic objects and forms are viewed as a metaphor for self-identity. Focusing on the desire for intactness and preservation, Wood chooses particular elements of her parent’s home that, although once obscure or mundanely functional aspects of day-to-day life, become overblown with a relevance they never had previously. The further away in time from their actual use they go the more detail is lost and, as they threaten to disappear altogether (and take with them their memories) the more their form is invested in. The constructive effort that goes into maintaining the concreteness of the experience is played out in each set which is yet grounded in slippage and the impossibility of achieving the goal.
EARLY WORKS
