Hayakal al-Nur

(The Shape of Light)

An open-ended drawing and writing project

Hayakal al-Nur (The Shape of Light)

Hayakal al-Nur is an eight-series project unfolding over an extended duration, a serial exploration of light as structure, memory, and revelation. The works emerge as living geometries of intelligence, conscious structures transmitting vibrational patterns of origin encoded in form. They are portals of divine self-disclosure (tajalli), receiving perception as spaces of meditation and revelation. The project unfolds through sustained drawing practice, serial composition, and the pairing of image and text as co-constitutive forms.

The project’s title is drawn from Suhrawardi’s Hayakal al-Nur (The Shape of Light), a metaphysical treatise in which Divine Light is the foundational structure of all reality.

Series 1: The Codex of Light (2025)

Series 1 presents sixty-seven large-scale digital compositions, each constructed from graphite drawings and paired with an original title and verse. Together, the drawing, verse, and title form a resonant field. Each composition opens a vibrational space where structure and frequency meet in quiet equilibrium, poised between stillness and motion. They are sites of deep seeing and listening; portals of revelation renewed with every encounter.

The compositions are singularities: patterned rhythms of intelligence and memory, alive and reshaping themselves, altering time and anchoring thought with every tracing of the eye.
Series 1 is divided into seven sequences, organizing the compositions into movements that each articulate a distinct metaphysical principle. Together, they chart the full arc of remembrance and revelation.

The verses, written in aphoristic and poetic form, act as vibrational keys. They activate each drawing from within its own architecture. As they trace the emanation of light, they also enact its degradation: refracting, filtering, and transmitting it as it descends into the material, emotional, and cognitive planes. Each verse or aphorism becomes a shard of infinite intelligence, remembered in language, momentarily stilled in form.

The project sits at the juncture of mysticism and physics, as structural analogy: it explores the metaphysical structures underlying visible and invisible form, while also mirroring certain intuitions of modern physics: resonance, field theory, geometry, time distortion, and the collapse of the observer into the observed. In this way, Hayakal al-Nur proposes a cosmology where metaphysical remembrance and scientific pattern meet as parallel paths toward disclosure.

Hayakal al-Nur is rooted in the Bone Drawings (2007–2020), a long-term inquiry into the twenty-two bones of the human skull. Where the Bone Drawings explored containment and interior architecture, the Codex opens into expansive geometries—generative, and unbound—yet still drawn from the artist’s Ossuary Archive, a long-term personal and material reservoir.

The works are digital compositions derived from handmade graphite drawings. Dimensions variable.