The primordially inspired sculptural work titled 'Our last stone' is a reference to land art, and the origins of sculpture as used by our ancestors most often for memorial, burial, or navigation. In this case the artist is referencing all three connotations in that the work is a memorial of our past, our current state of planetary warming, thus a preemptive burial, and also a point of navigation and hope as the foundational stone of the sculpture has yet to reach its melting point.

According to scientists and scriptures the sun will envelope the earth. The artist imagines this sculpture as a snap shot of the moment that all stone stacks on mountain passes and beaches melt in a flash. By metaphorically suspending this moment in which all but one stone has melted the artist is presenting both the immediacy of our existential threat and an optimistic vision in a beautifully meditative form that is at once accepting and surrendering to what has past, eg our world post-industrial revolution and the prosperity it bestows upon us, while also focusing on the small window of time that our species has to collectively harmonise with our planet to insure that our climate remains suitable for our habitation. The unspoken sensual collective harmonisation of the work and its relevance historically and contemporaneously is the poetic essence of the sculpture. 

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.