A wall beside your bed.

I grew up in Morocco, in a country where geometric tile work isn't an art form you visit but a wall beside your bed, a floor you walk on, a ceiling above your dinner. By the time I left for Canada I'd seen tens of thousands of these patterns without ever being told to look at them, the way someone who grew up by the sea doesn't really study waves. Most of what I now know about how they work I learned much later, after the patterns had already been with me for a long time: that they're tilings of the plane with specific allowable symmetries, that almost every one resolves into one of seventeen mathematical groups, that the eight-pointed khatem star anchors a family of more than 140 documented patterns concentrated in Morocco and Andalusian Spain.

In Canada, the patterns are mostly gone. Not in any global sense: artisans are still working in Fez and Marrakesh and Granada, and the books on the geometry are easier to find than they've ever been. In the diaspora, though, original work is either museum-priced or mass-produced, with very little in between. Growing up Muslim and Moroccan in the GTA, the version of this art form most people encounter is a $40 Etsy print of a calligraphy line their mother put on the wall for Ramadan. The actual tradition, with its geometry and layering and mathematics, is hard to find outside a textbook or a flight.

When I was selected for TO Live's 2025 explorations, I treated it as research time. The proposal was to build a new body of arabesque work using data, design, and software. The question underneath was simpler: could modern parametric tooling generate these patterns the way the original craftsmen did with sand boxes and trial-and-error, and could the work that came out the other end still feel like the thing I remembered from home. I spent the year studying the mathematics, mostly through Brian Wichmann's analysis of how the sine rule governs the construction of rosettes from a small set of base angles in multiples of 22.5°, then writing the software that takes the rules of a pattern and produces the cut files for a laser. The studio is called SVG Stack Studio, and it drives every piece I make.

The work is a fusion. The patterns themselves are drawn from the Maghreb tradition, often referencing specific places: the Sala del Mexuar at the Alhambra, the Madrasa Bou Inania in Meknes, the entrance arches of the Madrasa Bou Inania in Fez. What I do with them is contemporary: punchy spray-paint colors instead of the conventional zellige palette, layered laser-cut cardboard instead of stone or tile, depth and shadow in place of the flat tile surface the original work was usually confined to. The process runs from a parametric sketch through laser cutting, hand-cleaning each layer, priming, painting in Behr Premium spray paint and hand-rolled acrylic, building the frame in wood, and assembling the stack with measured gaps so the shadows themselves become part of the pattern. By the time a piece ships, it's been through software, a laser, my hands, and a good number of hours I never had the discipline to count.

What I want from this body of work is twofold. I want to put the tradition into homes and institutions in Canada where it's been mostly absent. And I want to show, partly to myself, that a centuries-old practice built on physical material and human patience survives translation through software, and that the work that comes out the other end is recognizable as the thing I grew up around.

Mahmoud HalatIn collaboration with Xact Design
Toronto, 2026