Prita Tina Yeganeh_My Soil Farsh (The Sacred Shared Labour); photo Louis Lim HR2 Onespace
Lamisse Hamouda describes how an artist of Iranian heritage transforms labour into ceremony by making a Persian carpet out of soil.
(Lamisse Hamouda reads her story.)
The Sacred Shared Labour, the second iteration of Yeganeh’s My Soil Farsh فرش series, begins long before the soil carpet is laid. Forty-five kilograms of red loamy clay soil were first collected from the outskirts of Magan-djin/Brisbane, then carefully hand-ground by 17 women over 145 hours across a one-month period. Through rhythmic rituals of grinding and sieving, Yeganeh invites women into an embodied act of shared labour and community-building. This sharing of the labour, energy, emotions, and knowledge of making the farsh echoes the historic collective practices of carpet weaving among Iranian women. Through this, Yeganeh facilitates the transformation of labour into ceremony, revealing the oft-hidden process of commodification while recentring the collective work essential to community-building.
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- Prita Tina Yeganeh_My Soil Farsh (The Sacred Shared Labour); photo Louis Lim HR2 Onespace
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- Prita Tina Yeganeh_My Soil Farsh (The Sacred Shared Labour); photo Louis Lim HR2 Onespace
Throughout Yeganeh’s My Soil Farsh فرش series, the Persian carpet is de-commodified; the ephemerality of the soil-based installations refutes the reduction of the farsh to ornament, collectible, or furniture. The physical practice of being in ritual with other women through hand-grinding is storied by the motifs imprinted onto the soil. In capturing the communal experience of its creation, the farsh is further reclaimed as a site of memory. Yeganeh’s use of traditional motifs constructs a deliberate obscurity that resists translation, all while honouring the history of this visual language. In this, the motif’s opacity of meaning becomes an assertion of privacy by Yeganeh, a protection of environments that are inherently intimate.
The Sacred Shared Labour is a work of process; in this iteration, the farsh material is created through an act of collective labour that activates community building, while the farsh itself is reclaimed as a site of grounded connection and a place of gathering. As the soil carries the same profile of soil found in southern Iran, the farsh becomes a symbol of both connection and place-making; it is a situating of the settler-migrant, an offering of the place of the before to the place of the now. It is a physical embodiment of the experience of collective and community kinship. My Soil Farsh فرش series is a work of tender, rooted and embodied practise, holding a depth of intimacy that can only be attained through slow, intentional and shared approaches to time, relationships, and creations.
About Lamisse Hamouda
Lamisse Hamouda (she/her) is a writer, poet and workshop facilitator based in Magan-djin/Brisbane. Her debut novel, The Shape of Dust, was awarded the 2024 National Biography of the Year.
