Beloved Monsters

Ceramics
17 x 18 x 7 cm

My practice is driven by a desire to explore symbiotic relationships between myself and the urban and natural worlds, approaching them not as subjects, but as collaborators. Through a process of conversation and negotiation, I arrive at shared conclusions with these environments rather than imposed ones.

Hand-building biomorphic forms became a liberating exchange between myself and the clay. We moved in a continuous dance of control and release, each of us shaping and yielding in turn. From this process emerged Beloved Monsters, a series rooted in my affection for the ugly, the grotesque, the imperfect, and the unearthly, that have set me on a quest to embrace my own shadow. I see these monsters as intimate reflections of that tension: to accept your shadow tenderly is a radical acceptance.

Nahla Tabbaa is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores tensions between the urban and the organic, the beautiful and the grotesque. She is drawn to materials that have the agency to self organize, adventuring into immateriality, magic and alchemy. Her methods are intentionally slow-paced, meditative and labour-intensive and permeate strands of her everyday life to heal and harmonise her otherwise fast-paced life. As an act of resistance, she leans into alternative constructs of time and ancient practices as a way to summon magic in the mundane everyday. She sees our present state as a catastrophic dystopian world that can no longer be dismantled with human hands, but rather, she is seeking wisdom in the more-than-human world. Through working with invasive and indigenous plants, plant medicine, hiking, animal care and reading into regional mythology and folklore, her work moves towards a place where she can propose a new system of radical care and the sacred.