SBS World News Radio: A new exhibition has opened at a major South Australian art gallery this week - with a twist.
None of the artists are professional, and, for some, the first piece they have ever created is going on display.
It is the culmination of a special project put together by a pair of sisters who travel the state in a converted vehicle they call the Art Bus. Claire and Miranda Harris bring supplies, experience and enthusiasm to budding artists who, otherwise, may not have the means to create art. In a large white hall in the Kerry Packer Civic Gallery in Adelaide, paintings are being hung and sculptures carefully installed.
Along one wall are colourful prints of childhood villages and images of trees and birds from faraway places. In the middle, glazed teapots and traditional bowls pose on display.
Some of the art can speak -- in a way -- for itself.
That is the sound of a kind of ceramic flute, or ocarina, created by artist Asad Mousawi. It is the first exhibition for the Hazara man from Afghanistan.
And actually, as he explains it through a translator, his collection of fired and glazed blue instruments, about the size of a tennis ball, is one of his first attempts to make art at all.
"I made a few plates in the beginning, to start with, and I wrote my name on the plates. And then I decided to go back in the memories and make these (instruments). I think it's very successful. And I attempted to make some larger ones, but the larger ones take a lot of breath to blow into, and I think the small ones are very successful."
The show taking place is called Welcome House. And Mr Mousawi, like most of the artists whose work is on display, is a refugee, new to Australia.
Welcome House is the culmination of a six-month-long project put together in part by sisters Claire and Miranda Harris. They run the Art Bus, literally a large white van loaded up with paints and clay, canvasses and printing materials, and they drive it around to communities that get little access to art.
Claire Harris says they go to schools, aged-care homes and remote communities and work with people with disabilities and refugees living in Adelaide's northern suburbs.
"Communities like this refugee community here in Kilburn wouldn't see any art programs at all. So, yes, it's about access, it's about mobility, it's about building programs that are process-based, not product-based, as well, which is really important."
One who says she thrived during the process is Iranian-born Kehiryeh Atarpour, who arrived in Australia after 2008. She was taking English lessons at the Mercy House of Welcome in Kilburn when the Art Bus rolled up and started offering classes of an alternate kind. She has toiled long and hard on her tall, clay-built brown pot decorated with painted date palms and a flower she calls "Lala." It is a container traditionally used for making a kind of pancake, she says, and she is delighted with the result.
"This, for me, (is) like a baby, you know?" (laughs ...)
"(When) I came here, (I) don't speak any anything, just 'yes, no.' (laughs ...) Always crying, because don't understand people, what (they) talk. But coming here, slowly, slowly, little bit understand English."
But it was not just about learning English.
Ms Atarpour looks after her sick husband full-time and badly misses her grown-up children, who have resettled in Europe with babies of their own. As she explains, surrendering her mind to the creative task acted as a kind of therapy, offering some relief from the stresses in her life.
"I very (much) like it. For me, this class very, very important. I very like this class, because, for me, this class is like psychology (therapy). Because, always, I am reading and spelling English ... always, English, English. For mÿe, very, very hard. But this class is very, very different for me. And any days coming here for this class, I'm very happy, very relaxed."
But Claire Harris says there is no formal intention to provide therapy.
"We steer away from art therapy. I think that you can get lost in a zone when you're making art, and I think that may be the form of therapy."
Each piece, Ms Harris says, started with a story.
"One of the very early sessions, we sat in a big group, and we all told each other a story of our childhood, a memory that had something to do with travel or something to do with home. All of us. And Miranda and I are "ten-quid Poms,"* and so we had our own story about migration. Mark Valenzuela had his, coming from the Philippines. And that began to trigger ideas for people. And so people began to make an object that had significance for them, from their culture or from that early memory."
Here is the story that inspired Asad Mousawi's rounded ceramic flutes, from his childhood in the Ghazni region of Afghanistan.
"When I was about eight years of age, I went to a religious school -- not really official school, but sort of a religious school. The teachers, or the actual imams, the way they treat the students is quite traditional. So we would get whipped for doing anything wrong. A group of my friends and I used to escape school and run to the mountains and play and to make instruments."
Asad Mousawi says it was scary being in the mountains alone with his young friends, particularly because of wild animals, including wolves. But distanced by time and physical separation, he says, the memory has become sweeter.
"It's sad and also brings me happy memories. The sad part is you will never be able to visit the old memories again, because the areas where we made the clay and did those activities probably don't exist anymore. But I'm happy that I'm sharing this with my family."
Mr Mousawi says he intends to take photos of his work and send them to his children -- that they might keep him in their memories.
