Artist Statement

My work is about light. As a child, I would draw for hours, filling pages with dense, chaotic patterns until no space remained. Over time, those pages gained nuance and restraint. The marks became more deliberate, the compositions more articulate, and I began to recognize the value of what I had once tried to eliminate: openness. I discovered that it is within this space—what appears empty—that something vital resides. There is a presence that exists between words and forms, resistant to description yet deeply perceptible. My work seeks to make room for that presence.

My practice is shaped by a lifelong engagement with traditional cultures and ways of knowing. As a child, I spent summers traveling through Native American communities, staying on the Navajo Nation and visiting pueblos and mesas across the Southwest. As a young adult, my focus turned toward the Japanese language, and during my studies in Kyoto I encountered a living relationship between language, ritual, and tradition. Later, while studying Islamic art and geometry, I recognized a similar continuity—one in which visual languages carry knowledge across generations. I have since traveled extensively throughout the Mediterranean to study the material and geometric traditions of historic Islamic cultures. Through these experiences, I have come to understand tradition not as something static, but as something learned through presence, movement, and direct encounter.

My research is an inquiry into the methodology of the traditional designer—the visual storyteller. I approach this work through the lens of the inventor, a lineage that extends over a century in my family. This perspective values intuition, experimentation, and play as essential tools of discovery. When I study the Alhambra in Granada, the minarets of Cairo, or the mosques of Istanbul, I encounter distinct geometric languages, each articulating a worldview and unifying space through proportion and pattern. These languages are both specific and cohesive, rooted in place yet resonant beyond it. My work asks where new languages might emerge today: what stories remain untold, what forms have been forgotten, and how tradition might continue through invention rather than imitation.

During my MA studies at the King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, I undertook the development of a new pattern language derived from the curvilinear roundels of medieval Andalusia. Unlike rectilinear systems, this geometry is governed by curves and orbital movement, consistently holding space at its center. The resulting forms suggest layered veils, silken threads, and peripheral light—an architecture of resonance rather than enclosure. Across installations, models, and drawings, this language explores how geometry can structure experience, guide movement, and invite contemplation. It is an homage to the unseen forces that bind space, memory, and human presence together.