The Studio
On Making
Pattern is not decoration. It is a system of thought that has been spoken continuously for centuries through mosques, manuscripts, carpets, tilework, the margins of sacred texts. It is a grammar before it is an image.
This studio works within that grammar. Not to preserve it behind glass, but to continue speaking it with the materials, the discipline, and the slowness it demands. A line drawn in gold on handcrafted paper is not a reference to a tradition. It is an act within one.
The work begins with geometry. Bilateral symmetry, radial structure, the logic of the grid beneath the ornament. These are not aesthetic choices. They are the bones of the visual language, the underlying order from which everything else grows. The Eslimi scrollwork, the Khatai floral form, the Shamseh medallion: each is a word in a sentence that has been forming for a thousand years.
What this studio adds is now. The scale of the work. The silence around it. The decision to isolate a single motif and let it expand until the pattern becomes the subject. This is not historicism. It is continuity the only form of respect a living practice can offer to an inherited one.
Working Method
The method is slow by design. There is no shortcut in this work that does not show.
Surface preparation
Works are made on Japanese paper mounted to board, prepared by hand using traditional starch adhesives. The surface is built before the mark is made. This is not incidental the quality of the ground determines everything that follows.
Pigment and gold
Pigments are mixed from dry colour and metallic powders. Gold is applied in multiple layers, each burnished before the next is laid. The luminosity of the finished surface is not a single application it accumulates. This is why the work changes in different light: the gold is not flat, it is structural.
Composition
Compositions are resolved from the centre outward. The geometry is plotted first axis lines, radial divisions, the armature of the pattern. The ornament follows the structure. Nothing is placed by feel alone. Controlled variation emerges through repetition: the same form drawn hundreds of times, each iteration slightly distinct, the whole acquiring a quality that no single mark could carry.
Duration
A work takes the time it takes. This is stated not as a romantic claim but as a material fact. Rushed gold cracks. Rushed geometry drifts. The discipline of the practice is also a discipline of attention the ability to return to the same surface, the same motif, day after day, and find it still demanding.
Studio visits are available by appointment. Inquiries regarding works in progress, commissions, or research visits are welcome.