This paper seeks to re-imagine the concept of abstraction as a material mechanism for art-making. Abstraction is traditionally divorced from the discipline of anthropology, which is rooted in social context and descriptive particulars. Within this debate abstraction, as a mental capacity, is contrasted to contextual understanding, and entails a removal from the life of the people studied. But for the artist this conclusion may be premature and abstraction is more accurately regarded as a constitutive function of art-making. This paper draws explicitly on this proposition and proposes that abstraction affords the artist a material means of transforming how they relate and re-imagine the world, offering the artist a means of separating the properties of things from the things themselves. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Reykjavík with a contemporary Icelandic artist, I suggest that abstraction can be envisaged as a prism of open connections through which the representational utility of art is sidelined.