Nevine Mahmoud
The questions that drive Nevine Mahmoud’s practice can only be answered by the objects and shapes that emerge from it. The L.A.-based artist’s sculptural installations turn rooms into charged environments – potent spaces where pieces reflect, deflect, and speak to each other. She recently approached stone as a material develop ideas with, and started to exploit the element’s innate characteristics to undermine expectations surrounding it. By engaging in processes that relate to the idea of creating a void for a solid to manifest, like casting plaster and working with metal, or using methods that rely on the subtraction of matter to produce new shapes, such as by carving stone, Nevine’s work poignantly speaks of what sculpture can be and, most importantly, of what it isn’t. Through sheer ambiguity, humorous contradiction and sensual conflict, Nevine distorts and misrepresents the body, confronting preconceived ideas about how to live in one.
The sculptural installations you devise create a reciprocity between positive and negative space. Your work seems to intentionally interact with the air that surrounds it, in an interplay of convex and concave shapes, as if the pieces were standing within an atmospheric tension. Can you speak about your interest in this dynamic?
I consider the space around or between sculptures to be as potent as the object(s) themselves. Rosalind Krauss suggests in her seminal 1979 article “Sculpture in the expanded field” that one can only differentiate categories named as sculpture, architecture, site and landscape by what they are not. Late 20th century conceptions of what Sculpture can be have very much influenced my practice. I think this perimeter of what something isn’t translates as this fascination with positive negative interplay. Processes I use such as casting plaster and metal works directly with this idea of setting up a void, a negative perimeter in order to manifest the solid. Inversely, carving stone removes material in order to produce a novel shape. Both rely on subtraction but work in opposing manners. In the installation of the work, the space between things in a room creates a charged environment as the pieces speak to one another, reflecting and deflecting each others qualities. In this way the viewer may enter another world with them.
I’d be curious to learn more about your relationship with stone and how the unyielding nature of the material interacts with the recurrent fluidity and softness of forms across your work. How does stone respond to your ideas, and how does it contribute to their development?
Working with stone represents a more recent phase of my practice, where I look to exploit a certain characteristic of a material and furthermore, undermine ones expectations of it. For example, stone possesses a unique quality that makes it irresistible to look at. At the same time, to render it soft or supple requires a huge amount of (manual) labor due to its density. I like this contradiction, or at least, this foreplay. This conflict exists in my mind too, in the way I want to pose the work. At once sensual and humorous, and at the same time alienating and somber. Stone too possesses inherent colors and textures that can greatly influence the course of my ideas. The peaches and lip sculptures for example were a direct response to the availability of bright red alabaster and orange calcite here in California.
There’s a process of objectification involved in your work through which fragments and moments of bodies are made into objects. It feels thoughtful and candid, and there’s a special clarity to it, an exactitude. What brought you to elaborate sensual details this way? Is there a specific need that drives you?
Objectification of the body and the drive to see it and possess it has to me, since childhood, seemed a fundamental impulse of Western society. And one that continues to play a role in contemporary art as well as mainstream media. As a female sculptor, much of my work is underscored with concerns of the feminine… What does it mean for a woman to objectify her own body, to use it and expose it? What does it mean to dismember a body, to eroticize those parts, but to retain authority over them? Why does she seek an audience and who are they? These are questions that drive my practice and are answered only by the objects and shapes that emerge. Distorting and misrepresenting the body in ways that might bring humor or gravity, lust or disgust to the viewer is the only way I can see to challenge preconceived expectations of how to live in one.
You’ve been living in LA for a few years now. Do you think the city, the landscape, the environment you work in have had an influence on your practice?
Absolutely. I chose to live here because it felt conducive with the direction my work was going. Marble and alabaster being so much more available definitely kept me here longer than I anticipated. It would have been a sadistic ambition to throw myself into large scale stone work in London! But that being said, nothing is impossible. The space in LA is ample and with the desert nearby on has the opportunity to work outside all year round. The city too, is a strange place. You can feel completely and utterly alone here which is both appealing and a little sickening… The perfect combination.
courtesy NEVINE MAHMOUD
interview VERONICA GISONDI
More to read
