Well the stingrays are carved from wood. Most of what I do is sort of based around wood carving, and then juxtaposing that with other materials. Whether they're found objects, or things that I've created. The rain installation is made from silver-plated ball chains and crystals.

My name is Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, and I'm an artist based in Perth, or just south of Perth. I work mainly in sculpture and installation. I guess much of my work draws on memories and how memories can, as I describe it, inhabit and emerge from familial space. 'Cause it's largely autobiographical, although not entirely, is most of it's rooted in my own story. But a big part of that story is a mix of cultures, for me.

My mum's Malay, my dad is white Australian, and we're a Muslim family, I come from a Muslim family. And so there is a real blend of cultures, and I find while that's not a unique position, it sort of gives an insight into how things can mix, and how things blend together.

So many of my works relate specifically to my family, or to more importantly, individual family members, and whether they're present in the work, they're always present around the work, and this particular work, this installation for The National called Pretty Beach, is very specifically about my grandad.

My grandad, Grandpa Cliffy, as we called him, he passed away in 2009. So 10 years ago, he took his own life. So in that sense, the work is a memorial in some sense, a celebration in another sense, about my grandad's passing and I wanted to work out how I could communicate that in a way that was, gave it the dignity which I felt it already had. He lived up in an area called Pretty Beach, it's on Central Coast, NSW, north of Sydney.

The work itself was based on quite a specific memory, from I don't know exactly when but some time in the '80s, as a kid going to visit, as we did, out the front of his house there was a long jetty sticking out into the bay, and at high tide the water would come up under the jetty and under the house. The water was probably about waist deep, crystal clear, and I remember being out there by myself as a kid, watching the stingrays come in and swimming under the jetty, sort of passing under your feet, and it's just a fascinating thing. And then the rain coming in across the bay, and you can see such distances, it's like a curtain coming in, and just crumple that surface of the water, take it away, take the stingrays away from my view, and they just swam on regardless, and then it didn't matter to them, they weren't getting any wetter.

But that idea that they're there, they're living their life and then they just continue on, they're just taken away from what I can see and understand. I see that almost as like a phrase or a passage that reflects how I wanted to feel about grandad. Like, he was there and then he was taken away, but that part of him that matters just continues on. And I guess culturally, it's like that idea of a soul, a soul and an afterlife, is something at the core of what Muslims believe and what I grew up with.

So expressing that without being prescriptive or being didactic about something very specific happening, I juts wanted to get, to sort of, create the idea that life goes on, you know? That that consciousness, that something, that whatever it is that make a person who they are, it continues on, it's just taken away from us, here.

And this space set, I've got the privilege of sharing with the work of Kunmanara Williams. There's just a real dignity and a gravitas that I didn't expect until I came in here for the install, that really just gives a sense of reflection to the world. I mean the works speak for each other in a way that I couldn't plan, I guess, I couldn't do that myself. That's something that's bigger than the individual works, and something that I really appreciate. I mean, geographically, the idea of passing of elders, work from APY lands, sitting here with the work about the rain falling on the Central Coast, NSW. In that contrast but, there's such a unity, and in some way that describes this country, or these countries, and we're living on and in. There's just such an extremity of difference, but there's so much beauty in that.