EA: Sometimes I might take a year where I don’t write poetry. I have my antenna always up to try and capture the moments and the imagery, but I’m not pushing for anything. I don’t want to claim that I talk on behalf of my community, being Hazara, or the sexual orientation I belong to – any of that. I am thinking about the experiences I’ve had, the places I’ve been, the things I’ve seen – then this poetry is written, and it’s so amazing and beautiful seeing those poems also resonate with other people. In many cases, they don’t know you, they’ve never met you, but they feel that they see themselves in these poems. I feel like I give ownership of these poems to everyone who sees themselves in them. The example that you mentioned was very unique, in terms of it being written a lot in Iran. Many people who wrote my poems on the walls might not know that the writer is actually from Afghanistan. I think that this is beautiful. That circulation is interesting. So, I made a neon work using the traditional neon techniques, inspired by these images. I tried to make neon close to their handwriting and then made this new work. I use traditional neon a lot in my work and the reference is: traditional neon is very fragile. It’s glass, there is natural gas inside, and there is human breath involved. To make it bend, you breathe into the neon, so it’s a live object really, with a life expectancy of 30 years (usually it’s longer), which to me, it’s like a human body. It’s very fragile, it’s not going to last. It’s not like a painting which can last for 500 years.

But I am surprised when certain poems are picked up by people. There are a few other poems that were picked up by people. I remember there was one of my poems, which I didn’t put in my second book because I felt like maybe it’s not finished yet, but I put it on my blog, and that’s the poem that people associate with me. Seeing that reaction, I added that poem to the third book. As an artist or a poet, you wish that your work will reach people and when that happens organically, it is so beautiful.

SU: Someone taking up your poem to mark this wall, and then returning to make this fragile neon sculpture, that has this element of breath or life in it, has this incredible layered sense, that seems too, granted and possible when working across so many mediums. In fact, your movement between so many mediums feels seamless, and what continues between them is this sense that you’re marking space, that I am entering a threshold, where what’s primary is what is unknowable, but felt; the grace of being confronted by work unbothered by singularity. The artist Torkwase Dyson, who also works across many and multiple mediums, describes herself as a ‘painter working across multiple mediums’. I’m curious, for you, if there is a medium that is your centre or that anchors you, in a similar way as described by Dyson? And if so, how do you enter a work, how do you begin?

EA: That’s beautiful. That’s one of those reflections you need to hear from others. For me, although I work in different art forms, it all comes from the same pulses. I think the line that connects them is poetry. I think there is a dialogue between the poetry and the visual artworks, and lots of my visual artworks are influenced by my own poems and the poetry of others. I also love painting. I’m more of a painter in my studio. And also, I like to keep my artistic practice quite open. If I’m working on a project or some research, I leave it open to what medium would be best to convey the research or the theme. As an example, the last two years I’ve been researching the history of cameleers. I made this work, using the railway sleepers from The Old Ghan Railway. It was quite an accident. When I saw book holders in Broken Hill Mosque – in Farsi and Arabic, they are called Rehal – when I saw this object, it guided me to create this large installation of them, using the old railway sleepers, turning them into book holders, and putting neon poetry on top of them. So, it’s very open.

I’m doing new research; I’m going to places like Broken Hill and Port Augusta again, to speak to First Nations and cameleer descendants, and this time I’m very interested in the sound and voice and music of the place. I think in part because, on an earlier trip to Broken Hill, I saw this bird called the willie wagtail, and felt like she was telling me something, and I thought about the cameleers hearing this bird singing. It is also understood as a messenger bird in some First Nations worldviews. Different communities might have different stories with this bird. For me, I felt too that this bird is a messenger, so I wrote a poem back then, imagining the cameleers talking to this bird, that the bird was carrying the messages to loved ones in Afghanistan. My work is like that; it travels. People want to say, this artist is famous because of, say, painting, but I hope to try and stay with what I feel.

SU: Your process, that you’ve just described, takes me to what you mentioned earlier with your father, referring to Hafiz’s book, finding a poem to mark your way – encountering an object that takes you towards your next step or curiosity.

I know your recent work and project, including works on show at TarraWarra Biennial, ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili, a show that is beautifully curated, I think, to reflect kinship and relation, is based in research and enquiring into the experience and emotional memory of cameleers, as you’ve just spoken about. People, who were brought to work as cheap labourers, through British inter-colonial networks, to essentially make and establish colonial networks here, through building railway tracks. Tracks, as you’ve written, ‘ran adjacent to those long established by First Nations people.’ Similarly, your own curatorial work – such as the show at Kerry Packer Civic Gallery named Vasl – a word that is shared across Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Kurdish that can mean a ‘spirit of union, meeting and connection.’ In this show, you have brought together artists, that seem to me, to explore the ways in which their work as well as their histories connect. And it seems you’re interested in reaching towards these connections, collaging them, bringing them into relation, through both your curating and research. I’m hoping you can speak a bit more about your time working with photographs and memory from and in places like Port Augusta? Specifically, how, as you described, ‘conversations with descendants’ have informed your curatorial practice?

EEA: The collages, the photographs showing at TarraWarra Biennial were sparked by some of the notebooks I saw, left by the cameleers, and I could read how they were trying to teach their language to their children. I could see that some of their handwriting was of someone starting out learning Urdu or Farsi. I felt the desire they had for their children to learn to write and speak their language. Many of the descendants lost their grandfather’s languages too because their wives and children were not allowed to arrive here; there was this discrimination. And I think mothers are the ones who pass on language. The mother’s role is unique in this way. That’s how so many of the descendants lost their language. I was inspired by that. So, what I did was, in calligraphed words, but the words are broken, which shows that brokenness, that broken history. Language is more than just communication. It’s culture, ceremony and religion. So, over images of different places like, Coober Pedy, Broken Hill, Port Augusta, Marree, Oodnadatta, I collaged their words.

The conversations with descendants inform my work quite a lot because they showed me such a beautiful welcoming; there was something shared between us that is difficult to describe. I went to a gathering last July in Marree, it was very special; every July descendants get together in Marree – because Marree was at one time, one of the biggest communities of cameleers, and it was the last station in the North of South Australia; the rail line finished there. And the biggest cameleer cemetery exists in Marree. So, they call it Curry Cook-up night; making food the way they learn from their grandfathers and grandmothers; in the same pots left by them. It’s very informal. It’s very simple, and just so beautiful. A big fire in the middle, and everyone’s sitting around; live music; there is so much in this beautiful night, you know? The fact of being culturally from Afghanistan and the cameleers being from countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, there is this beautiful way of saying, ‘you are a part of us’.