Anwā' Collection - Exploration of Islamic Illumination

The Anwā' Collection
Before mathematics was written in numbers, it was written in stars. The Arab astronomers of the early Islamic Golden Age mapped the sky with a precision the world had not yet seen, and built from it a system of knowledge they called the anwā': the rising and setting of stars, the turn of seasons, the patterns that govern everything if you learn to look for them.
That same impulse, the drive to find the pattern beneath the visible world, runs through Islamic geometric art and the ancient art of tadhhib, the Arabic tradition of manuscript illumination in which sacred texts were adorned with gold and intricate geometric ornament. Every line intentional. Every repetition a form of devotion.
The Anwā' Collection is an ongoing fine art series painted in gold watercolour pigments on black Stonehenge Aqua Cold Press paper. Each work begins with the same geometric foundation and reveals something different: a different quality of light, a different depth of gold, a different reason the pattern holds. The collection currently comprises four works, each a singular piece, and is designed ultimately to be experienced as a complete wall installation, every painting displayed together as one luminous whole.
This is the work the exhibition "One Pattern, Infinite Light" will be built around.