Diana Al-Hadid born was born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1981 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is a contemporary artist who creates sculptures, installations, panels and drawings using various media.

Diana Al-Hadid refuses to be pigeonholed about meaning. She wants to talk instead about the processes, materials and finishes she uses in her extraordinary work.

“I don’t come in with this big important message and meaning or all this stuff that I want to tell the world and dish it out for people to unravel,” she says.

“I don’t have that kind of clarity ahead of time and I don’t have that kind of agenda.”

Her sculptures, panels, and drawings often reference “art from centuries past.” Al-Hadid also sources conceptual ideas and imagery from literature, history, anatomy, architecture, cosmology, and physics. Her work blurs the boundaries between figuration and abstraction.

All of which things, nerdy and obscure though they might sound, have a lot to do with the enjoyment of Al Hadid’s particular brand of sculpture which constantly blurs the boundaries between two-dimensional marks and three-dimensional structures, interiors and surfaces, and between volumes and voids.

“The reason I keep pointing back to form is because I can’t imagine a message without the form having drawn me to it. The physical problem solving the smallest minutiae in the work – the welding or the metal rods that I’m using – are so connected that I can’t not talk about form, and I’m assuming that people are responding to the way the thing looks, not the message behind it.”

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The assumption would be a reasonable one – once you have seen one of Al Hadid’s sculptures you soon realise that there is very little else like them, were it not for the kaleidoscopic array of narratives and references the sculptor has always alluded to throughout her career.

For the past eight years, the prolific Al Hadid has worked out of her studio in Brooklyn, helped by a small army of assistants in producing a series of architectural, handmade installations that engage with the stories, art and architecture of the classical and Islamic past.

The results have been a reputation-defining body of work executed in polymer gypsum, fibreglass, polystyrene, steel and pigment that frequently borrow elements from artists such as Hans Memling, Fra Angelico and Paolo Uccello while citing the architecture of Gothic cathedrals and the geometry of pipe organs, the myth of Theseus and the labyrinth as well as the stories of Scheherazade and the Tower of Babel.

When the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art recently asked Al Hadid to choose a work from its collection for a short, artist-narrated film, the sculptor chose the cubiculum (bedroom) from the villa of P Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, a Roman villa whose immaculate frescoes had been preserved by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius during the destruction of Pompeii.

“I can’t look at these and divorce myself from the event that brought them to us,” Al Hadid explains in the film.

“It’s one of the most unfortunate, but for history’s sake, fortunate events. It’s kind of horrible to say, but it’s a strange paradox: this complete destruction annihilated an entire region, but at the same time, preserved it.”

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