Abigail Lucien in The Brooklyn Rail

The sixteen sculptures on view in Wrought, Abigail Lucien’s first solo show at Nicola Vassell Gallery, depict cinder breezeblocks from a family home in the artist’s native Haiti, decorative iron window guards, woven bags of dried flower buds, and a ceiling-height birdcage containing a heart-stamped swing roughly scaled for a human body. These references speak to larger discourses on material as a keeper of memory (collective or individual), infrastructure and craftmaking lineages, trade routes and their attendant accumulations of labor, and the experience of belonging and difference. The themes that preoccupy Lucien are evident enough to be legible to most viewers, and a great reward of Wrought is the invitation for each of us to consider how they make meaning—come to matter—for us. What scents or shapes recall home? What would it look like to materialize memory or mythology, and could the process be reversed, in a kind of sublimation? How many hands worked to create your spoon, pencil, or phone? What transformations did all the things around us, including our bodies, pass through at a molecular level to reach their current states? Are these states of flux ever fully arrested?