Silence صمت

Wild pigment in egg tempera and gold leaf 23.75 ct on paper, 50x50 cm. Hand-cut and -assembled.

StatusSold
Date23 March 2019
Category,

There are two Arabic words for silence. One is sukût, which means the cessation of sound. Samt is the other type: silence not as absence, but as presence of that quality.

In this piece I am contrasting massive Square Kufic with delicate, Maghribi-based cursive, combining them through papercutting for more dimension.

The pigment I used for the background cursive is one I collected and processed myself in Lebanon:

The writing tool I used, a porcupine quill (!) was also foraged there, many years ago!

Creation process:

A penny for your thoughts...