In 2011, I was selected as one of eight Australian Muslim Women Artist’s (Projects) to be part of AMWAP, the Australian Muslim Women’s Arts Project. This was the outcome of a number of years of development, funded by the Australia Council for the Arts (Creative Australia) and the Human Rights Commission. It culminated in the No Added Sugar Exhibition in 2012 at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre on Dharug, Tharawal (Dharawal) and Gandangara land in Sydney, Australia.

The constancy of thought, probing, analysing. Words given shape into substance yet shifting, eluding and generating endless scenarios and questions. ‘

The process involved substantial mentoring in the form of two artist laboratories held on site at Casula Powerhouse in 2011, along with our own individual Community Cultural Engagement Projects. It was a truly wonderful experience and I am deeply grateful to have been included.

‘We don’t seek significance this way, it sits upon us as a burden that even the mountains refused.’

‘I have been woven through time.’

Unfortunately the Artist’s Book that I made for this project was accidentally destroyed. All I have left are some fragments and these poor quality photographs. In retrospect I do wish that I’d had this work professionally documented.

There is no reality but the Reality, 2012
4:3 video on DVDs

‘The sacred play of opposites and of contradiction as it unfolds within subjective experience, agitation becomes catharthis. The lie of “identity” is exposed and absorbed into one pulsing awareness ‘La ilaha illallah’, there is no reality but the Reality.
This video installation uses recordings from a performance enacted over ten hours in the artist’s clothes cupboard.‘

Gallery view of ‘The untorn fabric of what is stirred’ and ‘There is no reality but the Reality’ showing the huge scale of the work when loop projected onto the gallery wall.

It’s now close to fifteen years since I made this Video Installation There is no reality but the Reality. I really loved the process (including the many wonderful conversations I had with my mentor/curator Rusaila) but I consider this work something that belongs to the era that I made it and not beyond. Aside from referencing again in this small video (which compared to the way I exhibited it as a hugely scaled installation which was very different) it is not a work that I would ever exhibit again.
I consider it a one off made specifically for the No Added Sugar exhibition. In the future, if I were asked to show this work again it would only be as still imagery/photographs.

There are multiple reasons for this which I may articulate more fully as I develop my project In the Courtyard of Fatima al Fihri.
I was initially asked to contribute this work in original form to the So That You Might Know Each Other: Faith and Culture in Islam exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in 2018; however, the International curators changed their minds, which I am now happy about although I was very disappointed then. I’m sharing it here now because it’s a work that has been part of my therapeutic process and I do consider it the first stage of the Qarawiyyin Project.

I would also like to qualify (through the work I intend to make in the future) what I meant by The lie of “identity” is exposed and absorbed….

When considering that I am beginning my creative career as a woman artist at the age of fifty (aside from these very minimal periods of development during my Art School period/No Added Sugar) I am not reluctant! I recognise this as being my qadr ie. Divinely Orchestrated!

It is the complete opposite of what I wished for as a youth but I think being deprived of the main currency of my action, identity and small self has directed my work in content in ways that it might never have done if I’d had more opportunities and less restrictions in my earlier decades. This content has mostly lived in my imagination. I have never stopped creating in my mind, although motherhood curtailed my regular literal practise. Consequently I have an enormous amount of inspiration material with which to begin this (hopefully soon to be) Art focused next stage of life.

My aspiration is long reaching and I am content to work very slowly. I consider any opportunity to make work a blessing; however, I do also intend to be far more disciplined about making my creative life a priority/possibility. I would like to have created a significant body of work by the time I am sixty, God willing!