Sacred Geometries in Stone

2026

new work in progress

In Sacred Geometries in Stone, beach rocks broken loose from bedrock and malachites grown band by band from scattered copper trace the process of becoming Shaml (شمل), the state that gathers a being into one, the bedrock of a person. Through drawing, I gather these fragments into new wholes, moving from a scattered existence into a unified state of total being.

Stones hold energy and strength. Anchored to the ground or scattered in heaps, rooted, belonging to the landscape completely. They are archives of deep time, carrying traces of the earth's ancient past, witnesses to its ongoing story. Not inert matter but material memory, an active participant in the earth's continual transformation. In witnessing them, I feel my own bond to the ground that shapes me. In my compositions they are uprooted, displaced, then gathered again: matter scattered and gathered, a new belonging made from fragments.

Becoming Shaml

In Sacred Geometries in Stone, I trace the patterns of rocks and malachites. At the heart of this inquiry are bedrock and Shaml (شمل): the foundation beneath the earth, and the foundation within a being, the state that holds a life together.

Bedrock is what remains when everything loose is stripped away. Beneath the shifting sand and soil, it lies unbroken, bearing the weight of the landscape. Shaml is the total state of a being, gathered, unified, whole: everything that holds a person together as one. It is the bedrock of a person, the unshakeable ground that resolves a scattered state of existence.

In our human existence, we often find ourselves in a scattered state, broken off from our foundational truths by the forces of weathering, historical extraction, and displacement. We become like loose stones on a shoreline, tumbling and untethered.

The beach rocks, once bedrock, are weathered loose, broken from the cliff, carried by the tide, scattered. They are archives of deep time, each fragment carrying the memory of the whole it came from. In graphite, photo transfer, pastel, ink, and gouache, I gather them into a new ground, a belonging made from fragments. Within these compositions, disparate elements are brought into a state of suspended balance.

In malachite, the gathering happens from within the structure. Copper, dissolved and scattered in water, settles band by band around many small beginnings. Slowly the many grow into each other until they are one stone. The malachite grows its own Shaml. My ink drawings follow that slow becoming.

My work investigates the process of becoming Shaml: the active, spiritual transition from a fragmented, scattered existence into a gathered, unified state of total being. To become Shaml is to realize that even in our fractured states, we carry the architecture of the foundation within us. What is scattered still carries its ground. Through the gathering of these fragments into new wholes, the work seeks a resilient mode of survival: a way to hold the truth together, building a new sense of belonging.

Mixed media: graphite drawing, photo transfer, pastels; 22 x 30 inches

Mixed media: graphite drawing, photo transfer, pastels, inks, gouache; 22 x 30 inches each

work in process, studio view

sketchbook studies

sketchbook studies

Mixed media: photo transfer, graphite pencil drawing, acrylic markers on Canson vellum paper

Malachites: Sacred Geometry and Patterns of Extraction (coming soon)

Copper changes color when it is exposed. Left to air and water it blooms at the surface, green and blue, malachite and azurite grown into each other, a stone still in the middle of becoming another stone. The stone takes millennia to form. Mining erases it in a season.

I am drawn to what gets discarded. These carbonates are the signifiers of copper, not the copper itself. In the mines at Chagai in western Balochistan in Pakistan, they are crushed out with the waste. They are the beautiful evidence of the copper, crushed to reach it.

The stone has been sacred for six thousand years. In Egypt malachite was ground into powder and worn on the eye, to guard the eye. Green is the color paradise takes in cultures across the world. It is the color of the garden, of ground that is alive. Azurite is aasmani patthar, the sky stone, a bridge between earth and the heavens. The rings in malachite look like an eye, and here an eye wards off nazar, the gaze of envy that harms what it looks at. When the two grow together, blue slowly altering into green, the pairing is read as the divine settling into the terrestrial.

Balochistan is the poorest province in Pakistan, and its ground has been read as somebody else's supply for as long as anyone has been drawing maps of it. In Chagai, the copper of Saindak has been leaving for China for twenty years. Nearby lies Reko Diq, one of the largest undeveloped copper and gold deposits in the world. A Canadian company holds half of it, and Western lenders are financing its digging. In February 2026, the United States committed $1.3 billion to the mine, the only project outside its own borders backed under Project Vault, a strategic reserve of critical minerals for American industry. The copper is claimed before it is out of the ground. It will leave by rail to the sea, along lines first laid in the colonial era. The tracks were laid to take things away. They are being rebuilt to take more.

Sacred patterns radiate from a single point outward, spirals and concentric rings, one becoming many, the way malachite lays down band after band, each ring the record of a pause, an eye opening. Generative patterns that proliferate. The pit is that circle inverted: concentric benches descending, each the record of a season removed, an eye dug out of the earth and legible from orbit. Extractive patterns that deplete the land.

© 2026 Sarah Ahmad. All Rights Reserved.