Sultana Shamshi: Cultures Growing Together

Sultana Shamshi was born in Bombay, India, of Hindu, Arab and Persian descent and emigrated to Perth in 1982. She has also lived in Europe and South East Asia, but Perth has long been her home.

This work from Shamshi is inspired by her immediate surroundings and represents a reaction to the desecration and deforestation of our environment. Here Shamshi creates her own landscape binding the everyday with the coveted.

Commonplace materials such as plastic, paper and metal are juxtaposed against exquisitely embroidered sari borders (commissioned by the wives of wealthy Parsi traders in the last century) or intricately made millefiori beads from the glassblowers of Murano (a material instrumental in the colonising of Africa).

Organised by Blandine Hallé and Melissa Cameron, Connexions came from a desire to share contemporary Australian jewellery with the world.

This became augmented by what Hallé and Cameron wanted to share about Australia, versus what was at the forefront of the news media at the time; namely the Christchurch Massacres, perpetrated by an Australian.

Selected for their existing contribution to this dialogue, each artist mines and interrogates their own histories for their artwork. Together, the complex, nuanced and diverse works portray Australia as a community that respects difference and honours diversity and complexity, more effectively than any single dialogue in which we might hope to engage could.

Explore more work from the Connexions artists.