Our Last Stone draws on the primordial origins of sculpture and land art: the stacking of stones for memorial, burial and navigation. Abdus Salaam invokes all three. The work is a memorial to our past, a preemptive burial in the face of climate change, and a point of navigation and hope, embodied by the foundational stone that has not yet melted.

Scientists predict that the Sun will one day engulf the Earth, and the artist uses this as an endpoint, enclosing the sculpture within the span of human time. Salaam imagines the work as a suspended instant in which the stone stacks of mountain passes and beaches melt in a flash. By allowing one stone to remain, the sculpture holds existential urgency and optimism together.

Its sensual, interdependent forms suggest surrender to what has passed, including the prosperity and damage of the post-industrial world, while focusing attention on the narrow window in which humanity can still harmonize with the planet and preserve a climate suitable for life. The work becomes a meditation on collective earthly dependence, impermanence and return.

Abdus Salaam’s 'Currently' works were made exclusively with a palette knife and discovered during his three month residency at The Institute for Public Architecture in New York City between June and August of 2023. These works are inspired by the seeds of the maple tree, and an experimentation of the artist's ambidextrous abilities. These works are a folding of time and form as the artist presents a seed as water, evoking the narrative of the Prophet Moses.

The flower that never dies

Is the flower that knows it is but a seed

-Abdus Salaam

Salaam’s Heartwood tree ring works are a meditation on the heart unseen via the poetic beauty of trees as well as an ongoing dialog regarding the ecology of invasive species and their relationship to migration and notions of belonging. By focusing on the natural formations within, Salaam refers to our capacity for abstraction, growth and our shared malleable form. Just as trees are moved by wind, sun, and even those around them, we too are shaped by the symphony of life that surrounds us. Using sections of a fallen invasive old growth tree, sliced to reveal the growth rings Salaam suspends pigments in resin, pouring layer upon layer in a gradient binary of dark and light like the rings of summer and winter that define the life of a tree. Here, Salaam employs a brightening toward the centre void or heartwood of each piece. The artist explores the benefits and inherent beauty that even an invasive species contributes to its earthen home and ecology, questioning ideas of belonging and what it means to be invasive or native, a question that is personal to the artist as one who focuses on deep time and is himself a mixed European, African muslim.