The Arabic word ḥubb — love — appears three times across the field of a Persian carpet pattern in ساحل's 2025 painting Infinite Love. The choice of language was deliberate and, she explained during the conversation in Farsi, worth explaining carefully. She is Iranian. The carpet is Iranian. But she used an Arabic word rather than the Persian eshq, and that decision, she said, was itself the point: "Art and emotion don't always stay within the borders of one culture or one language. The Iranian carpet has a specific identity, but a concept like love can move between cultures and languages."
The colour logic follows the same layered thinking. She built the word in reds and warm tones — the palette most immediately associated with love across a range of visual traditions — so that it catches the eye first. The carpet ground beneath it uses a quieter, more recessive range of colours. The sequence she described is precise: viewer looks, sees the word, then moves to the carpet. The word arrives before the weave. She also wove the word into the structure of the piece rather than placing it on top, making it part of the composition's architecture. The three repetitions of ḥubb are not, she said, a purely visual device. Repetition in traditional ornamental art carries structural weight — it is a principle in carpet design, in architectural tilework, in the broader visual culture she grew up inside. Using it to carry a word, and a word that names a shared human experience, is her way of placing something contemporary inside a form that already understands repetition as meaningful. "I tried to create a connection between the traditional space and my own contemporary perspective," she said, "so that a familiar element from the past could be seen and experienced again in a contemporary work."
She was also specific about what she wanted the colour palette to accomplish structurally. The warm reds around ḥubb were chosen so that the concept — the word itself — commands attention before the carpet beneath it does. The quieter ground was not an afterthought; it was a deliberate decision to keep the carpet's visual weight subordinate in the first moment of looking, so that the viewer's eye would travel from the word downward into the weave rather than the other way around. She described the ideal encounter with the work as a sequence of three arrivals: colour and surface first, then the word and its meaning, then the question of why that particular word sits inside that particular structure. She did not claim every viewer would complete all three moves, and she did not present the sequence as a requirement. It is, provisionally, a description of what she was building toward.
ساحل, who is based in Dubai and works primarily in oil on canvas, came to painting along a route that is not the standard art-school path. She studied biomedical engineering in Tehran — completing coursework toward a master's in biomaterials before the thesis went unfinished — and spent years teaching art to children at Mahdavi School in Tehran and managing a gallery before her studio practice became the centre of her professional life. The gallery, which she previously owned and operated as a permanent space in Iran, gave her a working knowledge of how collectors approach pictures and how audiences move through a room of work. Teaching children involved developing creative activities from the ground up, which requires a different kind of attention to how images land on someone encountering them without context. Both experiences show up in the way she talks about sequencing a viewer's encounter with a painting — what they see first, what they find later, what they are allowed to discover without being told.
She described a family background in carpet — her grandfather's connection to the tradition — as the first reason she was drawn to the patterns. Early on she was attracted mainly to the visual surface: the motifs, the colours, the structural beauty. The shift to using carpet as a language for personal expression came gradually, not in any single moment she could identify. The more she worked with the form, she said, the more she felt she could have a conversation with it rather than simply reproducing it. That distinction — conversation versus reproduction — is the axis around which her practice turns. She said she finds the idea of copying a carpet almost repellent, and that the viewer should still feel the carpet's roots in the work even as they register the presence of a particular artist's choices.
She is specific about what she will and won't change when she works from a traditional carpet design. The motifs, the rhythm, the overall structure: these she treats as the identity of the form, and she said she tries to preserve them with care. "That's my red line. I don't want to copy a carpet. I want the viewer to still feel the carpet's roots in the work. But at the same time, to see my perspective as an artist." What she considers open to change is colour, texture, scale, composition, and the addition of new elements. She mentioned that she might apply texture to one section of a motif and leave an adjacent section flat, if that serves the idea she is working with. The decisions are case by case, but the principle is consistent: the carpet's identity stays; everything else is negotiable.
That principle organises the practice as she described it — a clear set of terms she has worked out through years of independent study and direct engagement with the material. She is not searching for the rules; she has them, and the question she is now pressing is how far they can extend. Her portfolio as listed in the dossier includes six works, among them Through the Carpet (2026), Threads of Time (2026), Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque (2025), and Playground (2024). The range of subjects is worth pausing on. Playground carries themes of childhood memory and movement; the mosque work takes on a major piece of contemporary architecture in the Gulf; Threads of Time returns directly to the carpet vocabulary. Taken together, they show her testing how far the carpet language can extend — whether the motifs and structural logic she has developed can hold a subject as different as a child at play or a monumental religious building, while the identity of the form remains intact. She talked about wanting her works to become broader and more personal at once, which is less a contradiction than a description of what the constraint of the carpet's identity makes possible.
She is also candid about what she thinks is at stake in this kind of work more broadly. Traditional forms reduced to decoration, she said, risk losing the personal meaning and historical weight that made them significant. That concern is not presented as a crusade — she does not position herself as the guardian of anything — but it does explain why the balance between fidelity and intervention matters to her practically, in each piece, rather than only theoretically. "The space between preserving heritage and freedom in personal expression," she said, "is exactly where my painting takes shape."
She has no formal exhibition history yet — the dossier states this plainly, and she did not contest it. Her experience of the art world has come through the gallery she previously owned and ran in Tehran, through teaching, through direct relationships with collectors, and through private commissions. Her sense of how an audience encounters a work — the sequencing she described in Infinite Love, the idea that a viewer should arrive at the cultural layer through the sensory one rather than the reverse — reads like something learned through watching people stand in front of pictures, alongside making them. She said she is currently focused on expanding her professional presence internationally and developing exhibition opportunities in Dubai and the wider region, though she was more specific about the questions she wants to pursue than about any particular venue or format.
When she talked about what she wants a viewer to experience, she was careful not to require prior knowledge of carpet history as the entry point. The colours and the surface come first, she said. If curiosity follows, the cultural and historical layers are there to find. She described this as a kind of ideal encounter with Infinite Love specifically: the viewer sees the colour, connects with the concept of love, then becomes curious about why an Arabic word sits inside an Iranian carpet structure, and what that choice means. For someone unfamiliar with the tradition, she said the most important thing to understand is that a carpet is not a decorative pattern — that behind every motif, colour, and structure there is a heritage and an artistic perspective, whether in the carpet itself or in a painting that takes it as its starting point.
At the close of the conversation, when asked what remained unsaid, ساحل returned to Infinite Love and the colour decisions she had made — the warm reds that pull the eye to the word first, the quieter ground that holds the carpet in the background until the viewer is ready for it. She wanted that sequence on the record.
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