This scroll opens to read Patience صبر repeated in a light and delicate composition. Yet as it’s rolled out, a different text starts showing on the reverse, in a much rougher script. The words, which can only be glimpsed, start with expectant hope رجاء and progress through different states of anxiety قلق همّ and fear خوف جزع to despair يأس. They get darker as they multiply along the way, while the recto shows no change.
This piece originally came to my mind in October 2023, as, not for the first time in my life, I watched violence erupt in the Levant and threats of escalation being directed at my birthplace. Every time this happens, the pattern is the same: You wait, hoping it will all calm down quickly. And you wait, and you wait some more. Outwardly you keep a cool and composed front for the sake of others, but in the places you keep hidden, hope is turning into anxiety, then into fear, and a mess of emotions that are increasingly dark and hopeless.
Though the idea came from a very specific event, this experience of anxious waiting is one I believe we’ve all experienced at some level in life. The occasion may not always be life and death, but the emotional intensity is no less for it. There was originally going to be an ending to the scroll, a resolution I found for myself, but when it came to the making I opted to have no known end: the paper runs out, but the waiting continues.
The design on the recto is based on stucco panels of Alhambra featuring Kufi calligraphy and biomorphic patterns, painted here with lapis lazuli and a mixture of azurite and chrysocolla as I wanted a very cool overall tone.
In contrast, the verso is based on the script of the “Nurse’s Qur’an”, which is a bold, coarse and rather chaotic take on the refined Eastern Kufi styles. It’s written using eight tones of earth pigments foraged in Lebanon, increasingly dark and mud-like (note also they are iron oxides, connected to blood). I used an extra layer of egg tempera as varnish so the pigments wouldn’t rub off too easily onto the recto; nevertheless this happens a little as we approach the end of the scroll, which feels appropriate as repressed emotions cannot altogether be stopped from contaminating one’s facade.
Creation process
