Abigail Lucien: Wrought

Overview

The term ‘wrought’ does not simply convey labor, rather, it indicates a process of being formed, molded, altered, and changed by circumstance.

Nicola Vassell is pleased to present Wrought, an exhibition by Abigail Lucien, the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition features a constellation of recent and new sculptures that capture the evolution of Lucien’s practice over the last few years and is grounded in a poetic meditation on memory and placemaking through an architectural vernacular.

A workable mineral born from the explosion of stars, iron forms the molten core of our planet and is also essential to human life, coursing through our blood. Crucial to Lucien’s work is the idea that iron retains memory. Low iron levels in blood can lead to forgetfulness —without it we forget. Lucien nurtures a commemorative practice through metal by transforming iron and steel, an alloy of iron and carbon, into conduits through which to channel past lives, knowledge systems, and traditions of craft that span across vast temporalities and geographies. Each sculpture—bent, cast, and fused by the artist’s hands—calls upon a greater lineage of blacksmiths from the Caribbean and the African diaspora whose legacies reverberate in the formation of each piece. The grates, grills, and breezeblocks transform into liminal thresholds where past and present converge and echoes of ancestral memory are rendered fixed in metal.

The sense of lineage permeates through Lucien’s material poetics. When Day and Hour Come (2024) features about 250 pounds of cacao butter cast in a series of heart-shaped breezeblocks. The piece—cast from a block borrowed from Lucien’s grandfather’s home in Haïti—can be interpreted as a memorial of care and speaks to the lyricism with which the artist reinterprets the built environment. Lucien complicates the perceived ephemerality of organic materials, transforming them into essential forms of infrastructure.

For the artist, sculpture marks a set of actions, a space of duality of both solid and fragile arrangements. Lucien’s newest metal works complicate the perceived rigidity of steel as they unfurl, ooze, and undo themselves. These pieces reflect an evolution in the artist’s practice that moves away from more narrative scenes and instead places greater attention to the energetic propulsion of the materials handled and shaped. This shift away from representational forms opens a new liberatory space of potential that gestures towards the multiplicities inscribed within the exhibition’s title. The term ‘wrought’ does not simply convey labor, rather, it indicates a process of being formed, molded, altered, and changed by circumstance. Wrought encapsulates a stretching of matter, an act of creation through intention so that material may transform into a meeting point for memory, geography, time, and the built environment.