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HOLDING SPACE 2025: Rituals of Welcome Workshops

Workshops
2025

HOLDING SPACE is a three year annual program of artistic commissions, creative developments, workshops, public programs and events that aims to provide a provocation and a forum to share cultural and creative ideas, experiences, understandings and learnings centred around belonging and community connectedness. In 2025, the theme was Rituals of Welcome. Learn more about the 18 artists here.

The following 2025 HOLDING SPACE artists: Jessica Tobin, Oonagh Sherrard, Shervin Mirzeinali, Elizabeth Jigalin, Paula do Prado, Kumari Abeydeera, Shyamla Eswaran (Bindi Bosses) & Justine Youssef led over 200 community participants in creative workshops.

From weaving to drumming, the artists and community members shared mutual learnings and stories of lived experiences, ancestral memories and traditional ceremonial practices of welcome. They all also explored their cultural heritages to re-imagine and create new cultural practices and diversity of expression.

The artworks that were created during these workshops were displayed as part of the celebratory exhibition at the Community Refugee Welcome Centre on the 6th and 7th of December 2025. Please head here to learn more about the visual artworks displayed during the exhibition.

Time to Weave
Jessica Tobin

As part of the Rituals of Welcome program, First Nation artist Jessica Tobin led hands-on weaving workshops exploring the art of making bracelets. Participants learnt simple weaving techniques while reflecting on the significance of welcome, belonging, and cultural exchange. These gentle, creative sessions offered space for connection, conversation, and care through the shared act of making.

Artist bio
Jessica Tobin is a Dharug multidisciplinary artist and educator whose community-led practice centres on healing, cultural connection, and creative expression. With a background in socially engaged art and Aboriginal cultural practices, she facilitates workshops that honour traditional knowledge while inviting personal storytelling and connection.

Sound Walk by the Water
Oonagh Sherrard

In July 2025, Dharug educator Stacy-Jane Etal and sound artist Oonagh Sherrard led a Sound Walk by De Freitas Wetland and Prospect Creek in Fairfield. The slow walk was focused on active and mindful listening to the environment and all the sounds within it. Participants were guided in listening practices where they reflected on the soundscape around them, and learnt about listening to Country from a Dharug perspective.

Oonagh's eventual audio and video work was based on that workshop. You can watch it here.

In the video, the surface of De Freitas Wetland is covered with native Duck Weed, lemna disperma.

Ngarra Ngurragu (Listen to Country). A song by Stacy-Jane Etal © 2025

Ngarra budbud ngurragu (Listen to the heart of Country)

Ngalawa ngarra ngurrawa (Sit and listen to Country)

Ngarra ngurragu bayala (Listen to Country speak)

Mii ngarradyimi (What do you hear?)

About Prospect Creek and De Freitas Wetland
Prospect Creek runs through highly urbanised parts of Western Sydney. Following rain, rubbish,
pollutants and nutrients wash into the creek which flows south into the Georges River. The Georges River Keeper’s latest report card on catchment health, shows the water quality in Prospect Creek to be one of the worst in the Georges River catchment.

Prospect Creek takes its name from its source at Prospect Hill, likely named by Lt. Watkin Tench in 1790. The establishment of farms at the head of Prospect Creek in the early 1790s, led to a series of violent conflicts between European and Aboriginal people. The Dharug warrior Pemulwuy likely used Prospect Creek as an escape route when he was shot and captured in 1797, following attacks and raids at Parramatta.

Colonists moved down Prospect Creek, towards the Georges river – farming the upper freshwater parts of the creek. Aboriginal people continued to live, travel and fish along Prospect Creek into the 1950s and 60s.

In the late 1880s a massive water storage reservoir was built at the head of Prospect Creek, storing drinking water from the Hawkesbury Nepean dams to distribute across Sydney.
 
Around that time, the banks of Prospect Creek in Fairfield were transformed into landscaped gardens for wealthy residences, popular for swimming, picnicking and boating.

In the 1920s, the De Freitas family from British Guyana established a garden nursery by the wetland which carries their name. Some rose bushes from this time remain. By the 1980s the wetland was overrun with weeds and sediment and heavily polluted with debris including dumped car bodies.

Following a community campaign, the wetland was rehabilitated by Fairfield City Council in 2011. Over 10,000 native plants were planted to improve water quality and provide habitat for native wildlife.
 
Sources:
Alison Cadzow and Heather Goodall “Rivers and Resilience – Aboriginal People on Sydney’s Georges River” (2009) UNSW Press
Stephen Gapps, “Cabrogal to Fairfield City: A History of a Multicultural Community” (2009) Fairfield City Council
Artist bio
Composer, sound artist & producer Oonagh Sherrard is inspired by listening to the language and music of the natural world, creating sound based work on waterways including "11 Stories from the River Dyarubbin", “Yarramundi and the People of Dyarubbin” & "South Creek/Wianamatta Turning" involving strong collaborations with Dharug knowledge-holders and community.
Credits
Videography and Sound: Sivani Yaddanapudi, Samantha Barahona, Oonagh Sherrard

Rhythm of Speech
Shervin Mirzeinali & Elizabeth Jigalin

Facilitated by musicians and sound artists Shervin Mirzeinali and Elizabeth Jigalin, Rhythm of Speech was a two-day creative music workshop for youth. Together, the artists and young participants played with the rhythms, melodies and patterns of speech – uncovering music through stories, sound and creative play! 

They explored the musicality of language and the beauty of accent as a space of belonging, focussing on the word “welcome” – a gesture that holds both cultural and emotional weight.

The workshops culminated in a short film called Rhythm of Speech, which you can view here.

The piece unfolds as a journey from articulation to abstraction: beginning with close-up studies of the mouth pronouncing the word, it gradually expands into layered voices speaking in English and then in participants’ native languages. As meaning dissolves into sound, words transform into textures, rhythms, and tones, revealing speech itself as music.

This work reimagines accent not as a marker of difference or limitation, but as a rich and expressive form of identity. By detaching language from its meaning, Rhythm of Speech invites the audience to listen beyond understanding, to hear in each voice a shared humanity, and in every accent, a rhythm of welcome.

Artist bio – Shervin Mirzeinali
Shervin Mirzeinali is an Iranian-Australian composer, director, and community-focused artist. His work is rooted in his cultural heritage and shaped by a search for new musical forms that reimagine tradition through contemporary context. He holds a Doctorate in Composition, with research focused on spectralism and Iranian music, and his practice continues to be informed by both experimental approaches and his experience as an immigrant. He is especially drawn to rituals—their layers of meaning, memory, and transformation—which guide both his solo and collaborative work, including his award-winning opera Panbe Zan. One of his proudest achievements is co-founding and directing the Iranian Music Festival in Sydney, which celebrates the diversity and beauty of Iranian music while contributing to a more inclusive Australian music scene.
Artist bio – Elizabeth Jigalin
Elizabeth Jigalin is a composer, artist and performer. In her work, she is often drawn to explore site specific music-making, interactive play spaces, and found materials. Guided by curiosity, Elizabeth collaborates and creates across art forms. You’ll often find Elizabeth making music with creative music collective @themusicboxproject.
Credits
Concept, music and video: Shervin Mirzenali
Videographer: Sivani Yaddanapudi
Senior Creative Producer: Vandana Ram
Participants: Aly Mashaly, Ezra Mukendi, Chantal Oredi, Shreya Sharma, Salar Hosseiniamraei, Anastasiia Kachurovska & Sarmad Hosseiniamraei

Ritual Mending: Lineage, Plants and Gifts
Paula do Prado

Rituals of Mending: Lineage, Plants and Gifts were a series of three creative textile and fibre workshops facilitated by artist Paula do Prado. Ritual Mending was intended as an invitation to co-create a creative and generative space to both directly and indirectly acknowledge that many different groups of people experience disconnection from ancestral, familial and cultural ritual practices as a result of displacement, migration and diaspora. The resultant material outcomes from the workshops affirm the inherent value in making time and space for collective creative expression as a way to reconnect with self, whilst also surfacing in-common narratives and strengthening community bonds. 

Workshop participants were guided as they worked towards open ended outcomes in response to reference materials including collected keepsakes, botanical materials and artwork samples. With thread as our shared language, for some this was their first experience of making in a workshop setting without following a set of steps or template to achieve a particular outcome. The works produced demonstrate participants drawing from and trusting their own inner creative knowing.

Artist bio
Paula do Prado is a visual artist, researcher and creative workshop facilitator working with various forms of tejido (weaving) based on the sovereign lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal people. Born in Uruguay on the lands of the Charrúa Nation, she migrated to Australia in the mid 80s. Her art practice surfaces the intersections of her West African Bantu-Kongo, Iberian and Charrúa ancestral lineages. Her art practice is anchored in the Abya-Yala concept of cuerpo-territorio-espiritu (body-land-spirit) and sentipensante (feel-thinking) pathways that are indivisible from her cultural and spiritual practices, her family, community and beyond-human kin relationships. 
 
Paula’s work has been exhibited in national and international group exhibitions, including the VIMA Cyprus Art Fair 2025, Limassol; Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (IOTA), 2024, Perth, Western Australia; The 1st and 5th Tamworth Textile Triennial touring exhibition; Tiwani Contemporary, London; Textile Biennial Rijswijk, 2019, The Netherlands; Bankstown Biennale:Sub Terrains 2022, Bankstown, and 4a Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney.  In addition to her own arts practice, Paula works as an artist in community and has previously worked with Spinifex Hill Studio Artists in Port Hedland, Wester Australia and is currently working with the GUL Collective, part of the Multicultural Women’s Hub, a program initiative of Arts and Cultural Exchange (ACE) Parramatta.
Paula holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts, First Class Honours (Textiles) and an Master of Fine Arts (Research) from the University of New South Wales. She has recently completed a practice-led PhD at the University of Sydney and is a member of the Sydney Indigenous Research Network and the Sydney Environment Institute.

Clay Rituals
Kumari Abeydeera

The clay rituals workshops facilitated by Kumari Abeydeera gathered participants from diverse backgrounds to connect to culturally imbued knowledges through the portals of clay and community ritual. Participants were guided to hand-build and embellish clay vessels to re-story their experiences of migration, embodied herstories, ancestral practices and more. Together we used clay storytelling methods to explore themes including Grandmother's stories, Moon rituals and Radical re-membering. 

Participants described how working with the clay was grounding, stretched time and held healing and liberatory possibilities. The tenderness of the clay and the collective care that was woven by participants provided a safe space for storytelling, co-weaving a community space for belonging and kinship through culturally imbued creative practice.

Artist bio
Kumari Abeydeera is a Sri Lankan-Brit/ish multidisciplinary artist, activist, Phd scholar, psychotherapist and M/Other, envisioning embodied decolonising feminist futurities through clay, dance, grassroots film-works and participative research, on unceded Dharug and Gundungurra land in the Blue Mountains of so-called Australia. Kumari has exhibited in the Blue Mountains, Sydney and Tokyo as part of group shows and with her intersectional feminist artist collective.

Drum. Dance. Connect.
Shyamla Eswaran (Bindi Bosses)

Community participants joined Shyamla Eswaran (Bindi Bosses) and Smrithi Karmakonda in an energetic two-day workshop of learning Parai Attam (ancient drum and dance) and Kolattam (joyful stick dance). Together, they created a rhythmic dance set to Parai drum.

Parai Attam is one of South India’s oldest drum and dance traditions. Starting with simple rhythms linked to names and words, participants explored the Parai’s role in community and ceremony before combining beats with movement.

Kolattam is the joyful Tamil stick dance performed in circles. Participants learnt rhythmic patterns and group formations, with space to bring in their own moves and styles.

Artist bio
Shyamla (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, choreographer and educator who advocates for anti-discrimination through intercultural arts. They founded BINDI BOSSES, a South Asian arts company that has performed at major venues and events including Sydney Opera House and TEDxSydney. Trained in traditional Tamil artforms and practices of Yoga, Parai Attam and Silambam, Shyamla integrates cultural practice with contemporary performance. A 2020 Harmony Medal recipient, they’ve choreographed for events like Fashion Week and Schools Spectacular. With 35+ years of dance experience and a Master’s in Human Rights Law, Shyamla works with diverse communities and has featured in local and international media including ABC, VOGUE India, Homegrown India and SBS.

Scent Distillation
Justine Youssef

Artist Justine Youssef led community participants in an immersive workshop where everyone was able distill plants native to her village to craft a scent that weaves together ritual, land and the stories we carry.

Her workshop explored ethnobotany, local ecology, and matrilineally inherited scent-distillation techniques. Participants nurtured plants, distilling them into hydrosols (floral waters), and creating scent vials as enduring symbols of collective placemaking and world-building.

Artist bio
Justine Youssef is a film, scent, and installation artist whose work is site-specific, informed by ethnobotany, and guided by worldbuilding processes. Her exhibition ‘Somewhat Eternal’ toured at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (2024), the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2024), and UTS Gallery, Sydney (2023), following earlier work at the Hawai’i Triennial, O’ahu (2022). Justine lives and works on Dharug Country in Sydney, Australia, where First Nations sovereignty was never ceded.

CREDITS

HOLDING SPACE is funded by the NSW Government through the Multicultural NSW COMPACT Program. Our project collaborators are SSI’s Community Refugee Welcome Centre located at Callan Park, Lilyfield, and Community Partners Sydney Opera House.

The 2025 HOLDING SPACE artists are Damon Amb, Elizabeth Jigalin, Ezra Mukendi, Hosna Saif, Jacinta Tobin, Jessica Tobin, Justine Youssef, Kumari Abeydeera, Maryam Hosseini, Oonagh Sherrard, Paula do Prado, Shervin Mirzeinali, Shyamla Eswaran (Bindi Bosses), Vishnu Arunasalam, Wendy Qi Zhang, Metin Yilmaz, Damian Wright, Guillermo Robayo Gómez & Black Feather Circle.

Photos by Samantha Barahona and Damon Amb.

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Always Was, Always Will Be, Aboriginal Land.

Our office is located on Darug land at Fairfield City HQ. We would like to acknowledge the Cabrogal Clan of the Darug Nation, the traditional custodians of the land. Our work takes us across Darug, Dharawal and Eora lands. Sovereignty was never ceded.