My Soil Farsh فرش (Carpet), Hand-ground red loamy soil, Imprinting motifs, Imprinting 1, 2024.

Photographed by Thomas Oliver www.thomasoliver.photo  

 My Soil Farsh فرش (Carpet), Iteration 2 - The Sacred Shared Labour,  Hand-ground red loamy soil, Printing Carpet, 2024.

Photographed by Thomas Oliver www.thomasoliver.photo  

​The Sacred Shared Labour, the second iteration of Yeganeh’s My Soil Farsh فرش  series,  begins long before the soil carpet is laid. Over two months, 45 kilograms of red loamy clay soil is carefully hand-ground by 17 women in an embodied act of shared labour and community-building. Through rhythmic grinding and sieving, Yeganeh invites women in her community to share in the making, energy, emotions, and knowledge of creating the farsh— echoing the historic collective practices of carpet weaving among Iranian women. In this way, Yeganeh transforms labour into ceremony, revealing the often-hidden process of commodification while recentring the collective experiences essential to community-building.

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 mere ornament, collectible, or furniture. For Yeganeh, the “physical practise of being in ritual with other women through hand-grinding” is storied by the motifs imprinted onto the soil. In this way, the farsh is further reclaimed as a site of memory, capturing the communal experience of its creation. Yeganeh’s use of traditional motifs further honours visual language  to translate the symbols, Yeganeh constructs a deliberate obscurity that resists translation; this obscurity honours and protects 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, the farsh itself  returned to a site of grounded connection is reclaimed as a place of gathering. It is a situating of the settler-migrant upon this land, 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 is a work of tender, rooted and embodied practise, holding a depth that can only be attained through slow, intentional, shared approaches to time, relationships, and creations.  

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Exhibition essay written by Lamisse Hamouda