Nabilah Nordin’s installation, Corinthian Clump (2023), is like an unruly party in a place where parties aren’t allowed. It’s a gathering of six abstract sculptures inside the sanctuary of a temple. The temple is the neoclassical vestibule at the entrance to the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ historic building. Each sculpture is a riotous welter of colours, textures, materials, and improbable forms, thrown into relief against the smooth brown stone of the temple interior. Corinthian Clump is impossible to avoid, and makes lavish appeals for the attention of every visitor. It rudely stays in place for the duration of The National 4.

The work’s title alone hints at Nordin’s subversive intentions. The design of the vestibule is based on the Ionic classical order, but her nod to the Corinthian confuses this distinction. A ‘clump’ suggests something shapeless and tossed together – qualities at odds with the Art Gallery’s imposing and symmetrical 1906 edifice. Corinthian Clump’s sculptures can allude to towers of reconstituted rubble, or flying space junk collected on a magnet. They are animated by a tension between the will to hold together and the will to unravel. She describes them as ‘anti-monumental’ for the way they flirt with failure.

While Nordin works against neoclassical monumentalism, she can’t help celebrating some of its formal characteristics. The vestibule’s curved contours infiltrate the work in voluptuous fragments, evoking Ionic scrolls, unfurling acanthus leaves, fluted shafts, and circular mouldings. They play off her more angular vectors and introduce a decorative rhythmic language (with a whiff of postmodern pastiche). Nordin’s sculptural practice is a hungry one that absorbs whatever comes its way.

Hunger and ingenuity can make a great and surprising meal, and the artist applies this rule in the studio. She likens her inventory of materials to ‘a pantry where there’s dough, whipped cream, crumbs, and last night’s leftovers. I go to it not knowing what I’ll put together with these ingredients.’ (1) Her pantry might include balloons, beeswax, fabric, resin, foam, pigments, and paint which she uses in a rigorous but unpredictable process of creative play. Ingredients are mixed, merged, and assembled, slowly congealing into structures bound with lashings of frenetic texture.

As if bearing the imprint of this studio cookery, her forms readily conjure the vocabulary of food. They can have the pillowy appearance of baked goods with edible-looking finishes, ranging from the crumbly, crunchy, and crispy, to the gooey, fluffy, and saucy. Nordin entices us into a heady, desirous interaction with her works: rather than admire them coolly from a distance, we feast on them up close with our senses. This idea found its apotheosis in Please do not eat the sculptures (2021), her dinner-party-cum-exhibition where guests ate from dishes camouflaged within a sculptural tableau.

The spirit of Corinthian Clump feels aligned with the Baroque – Catholicism’s 17th-century art movement that strayed from classical restraint to fire up the imaginations of the faithful. Like Nordin, it opted for sensual abundance and the wondrously bizarre, for movement, colour and tactile richness. Yet there are also shades of horror in Corinthian Clump’s wreckages of forms. Yes, it’s a party of baroque proportions, but perhaps one fuelled by the anxieties of our age.

(1) Conversation between the artist and author, 15 November 2022.