Goolugatup Heathcote’s TILT presents Shelter exhibition by Abdul-Rahman Abdullah and Anna Louise Richardson

When your parents are artists Abdul-Rahman Abdullah and Anna Louise Richardson, you can be forgiven for thinking all adults live a creative life. “Our kids always ask what other adults make,” Abdullah laughs. “To them, everyone makes something in a studio somewhere because nearly all our friends do, too.” Having met in 2012 during their studies at Curtin University, the husband-and-wife duo are raising the other members of what they fondly call their “A team” — Aziza, 6, Althea, 4, and Aqeel, 3 — on Richardson’s family farm in Mardella, off Mundijong Road. It makes the youngsters the seventh generation to live on the 3000-acre Peel region cattle property, which is only 40 minutes from Perth. “It’s a fully rural experience and upbringing,” Richardson, whose father still runs the property, says. “My sister also lives on the farm with her family. There’s only the two of us, and we grew up helping on the farm, and we had sheep, and then we had cows. We grew up fully involved in the family business. “My sister wants to take over the family business in the future, which is great because I want to still be an artist, not a farmer.” Abdullah adds: “And I have never been a farmer, but I will help out every now and then in the yards.” The regional setting influences their works, where the couple share an even split of their home studio space, as their artistic practices offer alternative perspectives across diverse communities, finding common ground in the intersections of culture, family, and the natural world. It is a practice that sees them team up on a project every couple of years, collaborating on the same ideas and outcomes of an exhibition while still creating their individual artworks. While Richardson works mostly in 2-D with her charcoal drawing, Abdullah fills up more of his studio with his 3-D wooden sculptures and carvings, leading to a more crowded workspace. “He always comes into my studio and goes ‘you have so much space’, but I have white walls ready for displaying work,” Richardson says. “Works come from stories and experiences from our lives, or expanded upon from those, and they’re about the identity of who we are. You can’t separate us from the work in a lot of ways, and for this show, it just made so much sense to work together.” Richardson is referring to their collaboration on the exhibition Shelter for annual site-responsive commission TILT at Goolugatup Heathcote. Returning for its 16th year, TILT invites artists to develop new works to reflect the history and heritage of the Applecross cultural precinct site, which Abdullah and Richardson have done by exploring the multiple threads that bind birds and humans. As the elevated site along the Derbal Yerrigan (Swan River) acts as a refuge for native bird species, the pair offer audiences an immersive experience in the communal life of two endemic Australasian birds that coexist with us — the silver gull and the welcome swallow. Richardson’s large-scale charcoal drawings on cement fibre board of welcome swallows in full flight — paired with a more intimate series of graphite works on paper — are inspired by the species which made nests in the sheltered eaves of her family’s rural home. Abdullah has carved a 75-strong flock of life-sized silver gulls, cast in gypsum composite, who are roosting together on the gallery space floor as they wait for nightfall. “This show in itself is quite broad, where the very starting point for me was just those early interactions with feeding seagulls during my childhood, which is the most Perth thing you could be doing with wild animals,” Abdullah, who grew up in suburban Victoria Park, says. “We get to present the whole of us when we work together. It’s just one of the joys. You get the family, you get the farm, you get everything about us.” Richardson says they were also thrilled to be able to work on such a family-friendly project on the Goolugatup site, a significant space for children in Noongar history. “It’s really wonderful to be able to make a show that is about us as a family, and to be very open and family-friendly in a space like that; it just felt right,” she says. “We wanted to make a show about the impact humans have on animals, but from a positive lens. In my work, I want to practise radical optimism. To talk about it, but in a way that doesn’t just make us all feel that deep grief… We have little kids, and we don’t want to present to them something that’s saying ‘the world is broken and we can’t fix it’. We want to work towards ‘how do we make it better?’ rather than ‘what’s wrong with it?’.” TILT commission Shelter opens at 5pm on November 30 and is showing at Goolugatup Heathcote Gallery until January 19.