Umayyad Collection

Named after the Umayyad Caliphate, the collection aims to transpose “the definitive characteristic in all Islamic art”, design element known as the arabesque.

“Arabesque strives, not to concentrate the attention upon any definite object, to liven and quicken the appreciative faculties, but to diffuse them. It is centrifugal, and leads to a kind of abstraction, a kind of self-hypnotism even, so that the devotee kneeling towards Makkah can bemuse himself in the maze of regular patterning that confront him, and free his mind from all connection with bodily and earthly things.” –  Martin S. Briggs

The expression embodied in its interlacing pattern, cohesive movement, gravity, mass, and volume signifies infinity and produces a contemplative feeling in the spectator leading him slowly into the depth of the Divine presence. Many arabesque patterns disappear under a framing edge without ending, and thus can be regarded as infinitely extendable outside the space they actually occupy.