The work · four

The wall

الجدار

The flat work is not flat. Tile, relief and mural are where the clay, the metal and the writing end up in the same plane — and the only place all three materials meet.

Made in 2005.

Ceramic and bronze in one wall. It is the largest single surface in the record so far, and the clearest statement of what he does when the work has to hold a room rather than stand in it.

A large wall of ceramic tiles with a bronze star form at its centre.
Ceramic and bronze wall, 2005.
A grid of glazed tiles each carrying a line of Arabic script.
Wall of glazed tiles, each carrying a line of Arabic. Al-Hussein Gardens, Amman.
Painted ceramic heads held in a welded iron grid.
Heads held in an iron grid. Painted ceramic and forged iron.
A glazed ceramic head form seen close, the surface pitted and warm.
Glazed ceramic. The surface is the subject.
A ceramic bull form in glazed clay against a plain ground.
Glazed ceramic.
A ceramic plate with a winged form incised and glazed into it.
Glazed ceramic plate. The flat work carries the same figures as the standing work.

Murals and architectural commissions are the least documented part of the practice. Several large ceramic murals are held in one private collection in Amman, bought from him twenty-five years ago and never catalogued; others are in buildings that are still standing and have never been photographed properly. Recording them is the first task of the archive.

Built into the wall

Some of it is not hung on a building. It is part of one.

A hunting scene in bronze, recessed into a stone facade against a ground of veined onyx — figures with spears, an ibex, a bull turning. And elsewhere a run of dark panels set across a courtyard wall, each one a face or a sign, spaced out along the stone like a line of writing.

A bronze hunting relief set into a recess in a stone wall, against a ground of veined golden onyx: two figures with spears and three animals.
Bronze on stone.
The same relief seen from further back, showing it built into the facade of a stone building under a deep blue sky.
The same work, in its wall.
A stone courtyard wall carrying a spaced line of dark bronze relief panels of varying sizes.
Bronze on stone.
A single dark panel: two square eye forms above a mouth, on a carved stone ground.
One panel.
Close detail of a bronze face — the brow, the long nose and the lips catching light.
Detail.
A hundred faces round a star

Gold ground, one green star, and every face different.

An eight-pointed star in green on a gilded field, and framing it about a hundred small tiles, each one a modelled face glazed in a different colour. Nothing in the border repeats — which by now you will recognise as the thing he does.

A large panel: a green eight-pointed star on a gold ground, bordered on all four sides by roughly a hundred small tiles, each a painted face in a different colour.
Mixed material.
A cast bronze plaque of three horsemen at the gallop, framed above and below by bands of Arabic inscription.
Bronze.
The record

60 works, measured and sourced.

Recovered from his own published captions, not written here. Dimensions in centimetres as he gave them. Where a year or a title was never published it is absent rather than estimated.

1998
Bronze and ceramic. 400 × 140 cm
R04
Bronze. 500 × 250 cm
R05
Bronze. 300 × 180 cm
MA01
جدارية رموز. Ceramic. 81 × 81 × 6 cm
MB01
جدارية رموز. Ceramic. 81 × 81 × 6 cm
M27
Ceramic (stoneware). 83 × 83 cm
M49
Ceramic (stoneware). 83 × 83 cm
M50
Ceramic (stoneware). 83 × 83 cm
M52
Ceramic (stoneware). 40 × 40 cm
M53
Ceramic (stoneware). 85 × 85 cm
M54
Ceramic (stoneware). 85 × 85 cm
M55
Ceramic (stoneware). 90 × 90 cm
M56
Ceramic (stoneware). 125 × 125 cm
M57
Ceramic (stoneware). 125 × 125 cm
M58
Ceramic (stoneware). 125 × 125 cm
M59
Ceramic (stoneware). 90 × 90 cm
M60
Ceramic (stoneware). 125 × 125 cm
M62
Ceramic (stoneware). 125 × 125 cm

and 42 more in the same room, all recovered with the same fields.