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NEVINE IDRIS: Hi, my name is the address I studied visual arts at Caroline Chisholm College. My body of work is about my mum, and the journey of migration she took from South Sudan to Egypt to Australia, and each part represents one of those countries. My main goal of my body of work was to inspire younger generations of South Sudanese children because I never really see artists from South Sudan. So I wanted to be one of them to inspire and show the way for the younger generations.

I began by looking through family photo albums, and they captured the happiness and smiles of back home. I wanted the artwork to reveal the challenges and struggles of migration to Australia. In my body of work, you will see a series of pots. Each pot represents a different country than my mum had to migrate through to get to Australia. So one represents South Sudan, the second one represents Egypt, the third one represents Australia.

Each of these ceramic pots are important because they represent the stages of migration. In the Egyptian piece, you will notice that there are three different layers. Each layer represents one of my siblings. So the first layer is my brother, the second layer is my sister, and the third layer is me. Making my body of work was difficult because I had many complex ideas for it, but I had to integrate them into one simple idea.

I started by jotting down ideas of what I wanted each pot to represent in my visual-arts diary. After many drawings of the sculptures in my art diary, my teacher and I discussed the best ones. And from then on, I began to build. Using clay was difficult because I started building my pot during the COVID period. So during that time, I had to take clay home and build my pot from there. After emailing my teacher, updating her of my body of work, it helped me to receive feedback and progress in my body of work.

In each pot, I decided to use earthy tones such as red, orange, and yellow. These colours were inspired by the fashion and clothing worn by women in South Sudan. Being selected for artexpress is important because I never thought it would happen to someone like me, and it's helped me appreciate art more. If there was one piece of advice I'd give to a HSC student, it would be to embrace the challenges because it's not always going to be easy because you want to use the people around you for inspiration and support, mainly your teachers.

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