Maya El Nahal
(they)
Ravens build unusual nests. Though they start with a familiar twig structure, they continue using anything that catches their eye and fits their idea of home: mud, rope, bones, trash, grass. The nests can be huge, and perch precariously on edges throughout urban and wild environments.
Caught somewhere between unwieldy, erratically sprawling, and spartanly maximal, I work using sculpture, movement, sound, and writing to connect with place by exploring spiritual, social, and scientific ecologies. I am heavily invested in process and materials. I follow what calls me, and attend for as long as I am wanted.
Committed to queerness, my practice forges unexpected alliances to invite alternative perspectives. Our society operates under specific conditions, and angles us towards ideals of purity, hierarchy, and individualism, my work asks if there are different ways to read the world.
Facing the maw of ecological and social crises, my practice is a ritual for the under-celebrated, representing a hope that we could live differently. I want to create nests at edges, to build welcoming homes along perilous margins, and create safety while teetering next to ruin.
i am also a mermaid
Taken as a direct quote from the book, Julian is a Mermaid, a children’s story of queer acceptance by Jessica Love, this piece reflects on the intricacies of parenting under cis-het-patriarchy while being an artist.
The name states baldly, that despite dedicating myself to art practice and research concepts, I can also often be found (at my children’s behest) in imaginal realms. I make work, but i am also a mermaid (or a cat, or a baby, or a builder).
The forms overwhelm the wall yet move playfully across it. Despite drowning in domestic duties, I am also enlivened and enriched by being a parent. Our life is a sea of chaos, but i am also a mermaid, at home in these choices.
Cast in milk- and water-based concrete from empty baby wipe packets, the piece asserts that despite receiving/performing normative shapes, there can still be disruption. In the original story, Julian’s desire to dress as a mermaid is affirmed by his nana, in my case I am nonbinary/ace but cis-het-passing, and appear to inhabit a gender-normative role, the piece affirms for me that however I am perceived, I know i am also a mermaid.
the temple
this city is an old god who smells of stale urine, clutch fluid, and seared meat,
and prefers offerings of dragon soop and vapes.
this city is an old god who casts rainbows into spilled engine oil,
and holds onto puddles for kids.
this city is an old god who remembers hunger,
likes to gnaw on bones grown thin with indifference,
and suck drops of rancid fat from the corrupt.
Across sculpture, sound, movement, and writing, ‘the temple’ explores a contemporary queer animist practice to invoke more sustainable ways to be. Born from my ancestral traditions in Ireland, England, and Myanmar, informed by crip perspectives, and made in deference to the city, this project seeks a route through apocalypse. This pursuit is not about the soul-less gleam of technology-yoked futures, or misty-eyed romanticisation of dead pasts, but a hybrid approach, a chimeric spirituality fatberg of where we are now.
These works look to muddled edges, radical kinship, and unruly joy as guides for living and teachers for revolution. They use repurposed, discarded materials alongside new to tell stories that invite relationship with other. They ask whether offering blessings to seal bones, finding medicine in weeds, dancing for magpies, might change how we are on this earth, and with each other.
Apocalypse is not the end, and there are many who know the paths of survival. Together we could compost the smoking ashes of this time, and grow other futures from its grave.
Installation view
Installation view
A dance to call on magpie's rebellious, mischevious energy with accompanying sound work, one for sorrow. This piece is displayed as the film, devout heathen.
A gilded, eight-eyed ceramic seal-chimera who holds a prayer bell, and sits in water, inviting blessing. Milk teeth, seal bones, and my children's umbilical cord stumps are carried within.
Tongue.
Gilded interior.
Ceramic hands tangled in red rope hold lanolin-ghee ointment made using flowering weeds growing uncultivated in the southside.
Shroud.
Hands holding lanolin-ghee ointment.
A yoke thé horse puppet from Myanmar, symbolising the creation of the world. He sits on a cushion stuffed with hair and dried hypericum and calendula (healers). The cushion is made from my grandmother's heirloom fabric, and the t-shirt I wore to give birth to my son.
Cushion with plait.
A phoenix carved from felled ash, fallen birch, and reclaimed timber, burned to charcoal and assembled with pom poms, bells, yarns, and placed on a gilded high-fired ceramic plate.