Sculpture, National Art School
By Bineeta Saha
What came first, the egg or the orgasm? At the National Art School graduate show, sculpture artists Sarah Parker, Eleni Ioakimidis and Mia McCall engage the body of the viewer in a manner that is at once anxious, erotic and deliriously playful. These artists’ works inhabit the very precipice of sensation, reworking the no-touch space of the gallery into one of erotic encounter: the viewer’s hand may not approach, yet the work compels their body to imagine what it cannot hold. Here, the real content of the works exists only hypothetically—impossible to touch, yet absolutely, deliciously felt in the mind.
Sarah Parker, Sharp Objects, steel, wool, resin, 57 x 35 x 35 cm, National Art School, Sydney, https://gradshow25.nas.edu.au/collections/sarah-parker/products/sharp-objects. Photo: Courtesy of the National Art School.
It’s Parker’s Sharp Objects (2025) that beckons me first. A knife and a vibrator lie side by side, sheathed in soft crochet-a pair of old lovers, or maybe a pesky lingering hook-up. The knife, banded red and white, still seems capable of slicing; the vibrator, blue-grey, hints at ecstatic tremors a hopeful on-button away. But it’s the wool that cocoons them that gets me: a swaddling comfort that doubles as camouflage, clothing the objects in a cosy banality. Tension lies in this mismatch between what the objects are and what they cannot do, their thwarted potential prompting the body to imagine activation anyway.
Eleni Ioakimidis, Rest Assured, foam, fabric, found chair, 120 x 40 cm, National Art School, Sydney, https://gradshow25.nas.edu.au/collections/sculpture/products/rest-assured. Photo: Courtesy of the National Art School.
Ioakimidis’ sculpture Rest Assured (2025) also trades in tension, assuring anything but rest. Ioakimidis wrangles the domestic and wrings it taut. The work is a chair upholstered in pink velvet and embossed with a pattern of frivolous roses. Peculiarly, the seat cushion protrudes like a wagging tongue or an expectant erection. I want to sit; I can’t figure out how. Exquisitely tactile, the chair teases the viewer with its perverse unusability, forcing the viewer to stand awkwardly before it. Like Sharp Objects (2025), Rest Assured (2025) becomes a study in interrupted function. Parker and Ioakimidis both eroticise the readymade tradition, but where the frisson of Parker’s objects lie in their erotic potentiality, Ioakimidis’s chair is undone by its own premature stiffness—a domestic object stalled mid-gesture.
Mia McCall, Futile Devotion, boiled egg, 69 nails, VHS tape, metal, 20 x 22 x 14 cm, National Art School, Sydney, https://gradshow25.nas.edu.au/collections/mia-mccall/products/futile-devotion. Photo: Courtesy of the National Art School.
If Ioakimidis and Parker tease the viewer, McCall makes them wince. Futile Devotion (2025) comprises a hard-boiled egg atop a nail-studded VHS tape. The work brings to mind the classic bed-of-nails trick: a body can recline safely on many nails because the pressure distributes across many points. Here, the fleshy egg stands in for that body—its fragility heightening the risk, even if nothing gets punctured. McCall’s choice of sixty-nine nails (but of course) injects a slight humour that destabilises the work’s ascetic severity, tipping it into erotic farce. Step on one nail or a thousand-either way, the mind summons images of ritualised endurance and masochistic practices of submission. Does the egg have a safe word?
All of these works are NFS. These artists are protective of the sensual, precarious experiences they have created. NAS students-in the sculpture department, at least-are leaning unapologetically into the corporeal, building intense frameworks of pleasure, denial and longing. The carnality of the sculptures activates an almost reflexive bodily projection-we can’t help but animate ourselves within them, transpose where our limbs would go, how we might use them, touch them, feel them hurt. Tap that on-button, perch on a taut tongue, brace against a bed of nails. The gallery is a no-touch arena, but the imagination is a willing accomplice.
Bineeta Saha is a Sydney/Eora-based art and food writer and an Arts and Social Work student.