WELCOME

I’ve come to see art from the vantage point of hospitality: What does it shelter? What does it serve? What does it set free—not as rescue script, but as continual liberation that’s shared. My visual works are language based, grounded in almost a decade of research, experimentation, & practice within various global calligraphies—& in Arabic in the Thuluth sytle in particular. I’ve come to see it as away of “thinking”, substantially, through some of the pressing questions in our world & in how we respond to each other.

It’s because I have deep regard for traditional practice that I don’t consider myself a calligrapher. My service to the art is different: I’m in search of what Anaïs Nin calls counterpoisons—ways of opening space in a climate that’s increasingly compressed, doing so in ways that don’t flinch from the very real legacies of where we live.

Calligraphic traditions are often devotional practices, tied to sacred traditions. In many parts of the world, calligraphy is the highest art. Calligraphic forms & traditions are love letters in the deepest sense & passed hand to hand for generations. A disciplined surrender replaces any hopes for mastery or control. This feels pronounced to me here in the US—in an ethos hedged by by self-expression culture, appropriation, & isolation— one that takes individual freedom as anthem while also being, as Audre Lorde reminds us, on the wrong side of every liberation movement.

My early studies in Istanbul coincided with a coup attempt. Profound welcome, meditative practice, & the effects of state power, control, & violence registered in my body in ways that haven’t left. Lately, I incorporate ink made from recycled firearms to remind me of where I live— if not in lettering, that in ubiquitous underpainting. I seek to bend my own English with brush, reed, & empty space— I want to know how to write a “love letter” in American Ink without concealing her legacies & contradictions, or my own. If there’s a calligraphy unique to North America, it’s multi-lingual & held up by many hands. The joins in this script are often a fractured, sometimes illegible confluence of intersecting languages, global ruptures, & profound legacies of international solidarity. Love letters, when they are true, first transform the one who writes them. Too many remain unanswered & unrequited—& worse, rendered as if they didn’t exist at all. I seek to add to explorations of new narratives & scripts of belonging. I’m also in search of alternate calligraphies: Ways of getting remade oneself.

Writing love letters is dangerous: If they’re sincere, you have to live up to them—Frederick Franck