One of the categories of design in my ceramic pieces is what I call "Repeating Shapes", lines or shapes that repeat in ways that interact with the basic three-dimensional shape of the pot. If done well, the lines and curves that repeat reinforce the shape of the pot, almost like a visual echo. Some of my designs are carved into the body of the piece while others are achieved with multiple glazes and a resist medium. One day as I was thinking about my metaphysical pots and how I would like to find other ways of injecting meaning into what is otherwise mostly a visual form, it dawned on me that Arabic calligraphy is composed of lines and curves, the basic building blocks of my "repeating shapes". Why not use simple Arabic words and their associated metaphysical meanings in conjunction with a form suited to the words' shapes? Of course Arabic is written with a reed pen, so each letter has a width formed by the width of the pen. It is not my intention to recreate Arabic calligraphy on my pots, but rather to suggest abstractly its presence as it emerges three-dimensionally at an angle out of the clay form. Though I don't know Arabic, my husband does, so I had an available consultant. At first I used bookish forms of the words that, while elegant, nevertheless were not particularly visually evocative. (See the bookish example above.) However, this did produce some interesting results, notably Huwa Alif 2, "He". Huwa refers to the Divine "He", and the letter alif, here visually dividing the repeating Huwa, always stands for Allah. So the calligraphy on the pot in essence says "He, God."

More recently I've had the good fortune to consult briefly with Dr. Ahmed Moustafa, an internationally known artist and expert on Arabic calligraphy. (see http://www.fenoon.com/) He has kindly suggested some much more elegantly arranged and emblematic versions of words to use in my pieces, resulting in Adam and Hawwa, "Adam and Eve", in which the primordial couple emerge from clay; and the piece titled Rabbi, "My Lord".