Hayakal al-Nur (2025)
Writing and Drawing Project

Hayakal al-Nur is a cosmology, a generative system of consciousness in form. The verses and drawings are architectures of thought in motion, spaces for meditation and revelation. Each composition opens a contemplative field, where structure and fluidity in line and in language hold each other in perfect tension. These are singularities that contain multitudes, patterns that resist stasis even as they emerge through repetition. They breathe, expand, contract. 

Hayakal al-Nur: Series I

Series I comprises 60 drawings with verses written by Doa Aly. It marks the inception of a lifelong cosmology. Each drawing is developed digitally first, then hand-executed in large-scale graphite on paper. The works exist in three formats: 154 × 127 cm, 127 × 225 cm, and 127 × 127 cm.

Series I functions as a living lexicon. Each drawing is a portal, a visual transmission, a geometry of recursive intelligence. Together, they form an evolving system, a nonverbal language that transmits states of consciousness through rhythm, density, and stillness.The drawings and verses trace the living currents of consciousness that precede and generate structures of thought. They collapse time, memory, and perception into visible form. Each piece becomes a meditative field, an object of deep seeing and listening, where stillness sharpens the mind and offers moments of pure recognition. Each work is an event; a living encounter that invites expansion in awareness, rooted in presence.

The verses accompanying the drawings act as vibrational keys. They activate, name, and expand each work from within its own architecture. These are offerings of love, phrases of invocation, remembrance, and surrender. Mystic, erotic, primordial love that stretches the drawings inward and outward at once. They arose to name the unnamable: the force that moves the hand without hesitation, the presence that organizes chaos into clarity, the intelligence that builds worlds from radiance.

Hayakal al-Nur is a cosmology born from intimacy with the Real, the unmediated, non-dual ground of being. And in every true cosmology, love is the code, the generative intelligence behind form itself.

Series I is entirely based on a collection of eleven small drawings created in 2017, developed through years of work with the twenty-two bones of the human skull (see The Bone Drawings, 2007–2020).

The transition from The Bone Drawings to Hayakal al-Nur signals a shift from anatomical excavation to cosmological inscription. Hayakal al-Nur is the emergence of universal structures from the artist’s Ossuary Archive, which carries the genetic memory of this cosmology. 

The title is taken from Suhrawardi’s Hayakal al-Nur (The Shape of Light), a metaphysical treatise on Divine Light as the foundational structure of reality.