CHASING COPPER The pressed tin interior of Australia’s oldest remaining mosque in Broken Hill left Shireen Taweel with a burning question, one the Parramatta-based artist has answered with a stunning hand-chased copper artwork. WORDS James Perkins PHOTOS Carmela Roche CHASING COPPER The pressed tin interior of Australia’s oldest remaining mosque in Broken Hill left Shireen Taweel with a burning question, one the Parramatta-based artist has answered with a stunning hand-chased copper artwork. WORDS James Perkins PHOTOS Carmela Roche The walls and ceiling inside Australia’s oldest remaining mosque, built by Muslim cameleers in 1887, are lined with tin, tessellated with a simple, floral pattern that artist Shireen Taweel describes as humble and beautiful. The power, intent and resourcefulness of the cameleers at that time spoke to her. They were on the frontier of Australia, helping to open up and develop the country’s vast interior, but at the same time participated in a cultural exchange that has left a lasting artistic legacy. “In the 1800s they didn’t have decorative material and they weren’t architects. They had to use whatever materials were available to them to create a decorative motif for their own sacred space,” says Shireen. In responding to the work of the cameleers, Shireen applied hand- chasing to copper for the first time in her career to create a suspended sculpture consisting of 99 plates – one for each name of God in Islam. Hand-chasing is similar to embossing. It involves heating a copper sheet to soften the metal before using a metal hammer to sculpt designs into the material. “I hadn’t worked with chasing before so it was interesting to explore. It creates beautiful, three dimensional marks in the metal, which allowed me to respond to the pressed tin interior of the mosque in Broken Hill in the closest way I could,” Shireen said. CULTURE 17