This week I have ben obsessed with colour, specifically BLUE. I started searching for a book I knew that I had read about the quest to discover lapis lazuli in Afghanistan. Eventually I found the book called The Colour of Heaven. It’s now out of print but I have sourced an old copy I will purchase online.

It led me to thinking about my fascination with Afghanistan. Many years ago I made an artist book based on my passport from the first time I went overseas in 1979. I have the visa stamp for entry into Afghanistan in the passport but I never got there because of the Soviet invasion.

Here is journey of connections…My friend and I went to an exhibition of Afghanistan treasures at the Queensland Museum back in 2014. I bought the book which documented how museum staff in Kabul careful packed the museum treasures into crates to hide from the Soviets when the invasion was imminent.

Fast forward to this year when that same friend, fellow artist Annique Goldenberg gifted me a book which featured her contribution to an Afghan hankie project called Making Marks: Australia and Afghanistan. The project has been described as ”handkerchiefs that heal the heart of Afghan women”. Works are currently on exhibition at Counihan Gallery in Melbourne until 21 March. You can read more about it here.

It is the second book** which has come out of Unfolding Projects, an international art exchange between women artists from Australia and a group of women who are studying literacy and vocational training in Kabul at OPAWC, the Organisation of Promoting Afghan Women’s Capabilities. This picture above is of the handkerchief Annique dyed and screen printed which was subsequently embroidered by Salwa, an Afghan woman.

I placed my treasured Afghan lapis lazuli necklace on the pages of the book to photograph. Here is the colour blue, that colour of heaven that reminds me of how I bought this necklace in a souk in Damascus along with a beautiful ultramarine blue embroidered peasant dress. I don’t have that dress any longer but I still have the necklace. That necklace is my passport to Afghanistan.

Australian artist George Gittoes has spent the past 40 years documenting conflict in war torn areas from Cambodia and Rwanda to Afghanistan. In the 1970’s he was part of an influential artist community The Yellow House in Sydney’s Kings Cross. He has spent much of the past ten years in Afghanistan where he founded a second Yellow House as a safe working space for local artists and actors in Jalalabad. His exhibition On Being There is now on in Newcastle which I intend to visit in April.

Such a circular journey inspired by the colour blue and dreams of journeys to exotic locations. Camel trains and Afghans, the Middle East and the Blue Mosque. I can’t wait to read that book about the colour of heaven again.

**All proceeds from the sales of the Making Marks book go towards helping fund OPAWC.