LONG before Selen Nazmiye Bilal ever saw a Sturt’s desert pea in real life, she’d already begun designing plans for a sculpture inspired by the mysterious Outback flower.
“The sculptures I make seem to have this way of predicting where I’m going to end up before I get there,” she said.
At the time, Bilal was living in Wollongong and had designed numerous sculptural installations for festivals.
“The idea for the desert pea came about mid last year,” she said.
“I was living in Wollongong, and I found a field guide to native plants of the Far West at an op shop.
“The front cover was a desert pea and I’d never seen one in my life and was so drawn to it.”
She designed a sculpture based on the field guide’s pea and proposed it for a festival in Alice Springs.
“It was accepted however I was doing another sculpture for another festival at the time, so it fell through,” Bilal said.
Three months ago, Bilal accepted a job working at Imperial Lakes in Broken Hill with Landcare and relocated to Broken Hill.
“When I moved here, the desert pea sort of came back to me in my mind and I realised I had to build this here,” she said.
“That coincided with me seeing my first desert pea here. The volunteers at work were teaching me how to raise them from seed.”
When researching the flower, Bilal realised the symbolism of the desert pea was more related to her own journey to the Far West than she’d initially thought.
“The pea, like the people of this desert, survives by going deep – clawing through heat and dust, blooming against the odds,” she said.
“I always say broken hearts move to Broken Hill, and everyone I’ve met here is incredibly strong and resilient and a lot of people I’ve met and friends I’ve made have moved here with broken hearts, so the pea honours their resilience.
“In moving here, I began to understand what I had lost, and what I was growing into. This work is about the quiet transformation that comes from sitting within pain, building something with your hands and letting the land teach you.”
Bilal’s sculpture can be seen at The Shed Gallery, 94 Chloride Street, as a part of the current artist trail Red Dirt Blue Skies, which has transformed shopfronts throughout town into pop-up exhibition spaces.
Desert-bloom ache is made from entirely recycled materials such as metal, wire, fabrics, tin, paint, vinyl and glitter, that Bilal has collected on her travels and locally.
The exhibition will run until the end of the month.
