MĀWARĀ-E-AFLĀK XX26
Saif Ebonform · 2026
Heritage Walnut · Sculptural Relief · Edition of 25
THE WORK
There are moments in life when the world feels complete.
A familiar voice fills a room. A hand rests in yours. Someone you love is standing close enough to touch. For a moment, nothing feels temporary.
And yet everything is.
The body changes. Time moves. Places disappear. People leave. Moments that once felt permanent become memories, and memories slowly become the invisible architecture of who we are.
MĀWARĀ-E-AFLĀK begins with that realization.
The title speaks of what lies beyond the heavens, beyond the visible cosmos, beyond the limits of what the human eye can see and the human hand can hold.
But MĀWARĀ-E-AFLĀK is not really a work about distant stars.
It is about the distance between presence and absence.
Between the body and what remains after the body.
Between the things we can touch and the things that continue to exist only inside us.
It asks a question that humanity has carried for generations:
When the physical form ends, does everything end with it?
The work does not pretend to know the answer.
Instead, it gives that question a physical form.
At first glance, the composition appears controlled.
There is geometry.
There are boundaries.
There are repeated lines, directional forms, fragments resembling leaves or feathers, and an elongated orbital shape rising above the denser structure below.
Everything appears to belong inside a defined frame.
But the longer one stays with the work, the more that structure begins to feel unstable.
The forms are not resting.
They are moving.
Something is attempting to rise.
Something is resisting the limits surrounding it.
Something within the composition appears to understand that the frame is not the final boundary.
That movement became the emotional center of MĀWARĀ-E-AFLĀK.
THE BODY
We begin life inside a body.
It becomes our first home.
Through it we learn warmth, pain, closeness, fear, desire, protection, exhaustion and love.
The body allows us to embrace someone.
To hold a child.
To build something.
To walk toward someone we have missed.
To sit beside another person without needing to speak.
So much of human experience depends upon the physical form.
And yet the body is also the first boundary we can never completely escape.
It has limits.
It grows tired.
It changes with time.
It carries scars.
Eventually, it cannot accompany us forever.
The lower and more compressed areas of MĀWARĀ-E-AFLĀK represent this physical condition.
They carry visual weight.
The geometry is tighter.
The forms feel anchored.
They belong to a world governed by gravity, material and time.
This is the earthly part of the work.
But it is not treated as something lesser.
The opposite is true.
The physical world is where love becomes experience.
It is where another person's presence becomes real.
It is where memories are created before they can ever become memories.
The tragedy of the body is also what gives human life its intensity.
We hold someone differently because somewhere inside us we understand that the moment cannot last forever.
We remember voices because one day there may be silence.
We take photographs because some part of us already knows that time is moving.
We say goodbye because human beings cannot remain in every room forever.
What is temporary becomes precious precisely because it is temporary.
WHAT REMAINS
Imagine someone who changed your life.
Perhaps they are still beside you.
Perhaps they are far away.
Perhaps you have not spoken to them in years.
Perhaps they are no longer here at all.
Now consider how much of that person may still exist inside you.
A phrase they once said.
A habit you learned from them.
A way of seeing the world.
A warning.
An act of kindness.
A sacrifice you did not fully understand when it happened.
A memory that arrives without permission.
A particular laugh.
A place that suddenly feels different because you once stood there together.
The person does not need to be physically present for their influence to remain alive.
This is one of the central ideas within MĀWARĀ-E-AFLĀK.
Human beings leave traces inside one another.
Sometimes those traces survive far longer than the moment that created them.
A father can continue speaking through the decisions of his son.
A mother's sacrifice can shape people who may never fully understand what she gave.
A teacher can disappear from someone's life while a single sentence continues guiding them decades later.
Someone we once loved may never return, yet the experience of loving them can permanently change who we become.
The body is capable of leaving.
The effect of a life is more difficult to remove.
And so MĀWARĀ-E-AFLĀK carries within it a simple thought:
SOUL LEAVES THE FLESH.
LOVE'S PATH REMAINS.
Not because love defeats death in some simple or sentimental way.
But because love produces consequences.
It changes people.
And changed people carry those changes forward.
LOVE AS MOVEMENT
In this work, love is not shown as a heart, a figure, or an embrace.
It is represented as direction.
As movement.
As continuation.
Love becomes a path that begins in one person and travels into another.
One life touches another life.
That person then touches someone else.
The original moment may disappear, but its consequences continue moving.
This is why the work does not close inward.
Its strongest gestures move outward and upward.
They suggest that the most important things within us may not remain contained by us.
What we give can travel farther than we ever will.
A kindness performed in one moment can alter a decision years later.
A sacrifice may create an opportunity for someone who was not even present when the sacrifice was made.
A story can survive the storyteller.
An artwork can outlive the hands that created it.
In this sense, MĀWARĀ-E-AFLĀK is not only about death.
It is also about transmission.
About what passes from one human being into another.
THE ASCENDING FORM
At the center of the composition, an upward movement emerges from the heavier forms below.
It is sharper.
More direct.
Less willing to obey the horizontal structure surrounding it.
This upward gesture represents a transition.
It can be read as the soul.
As consciousness.
As memory.
As ambition.
As love.
As the human refusal to believe that the visible world is the entire story.
There is no single interpretation because MĀWARĀ-E-AFLĀK is not intended to tell the viewer what lies beyond the physical.
That would make the mystery smaller.
Instead, the work focuses on the moment of departure itself.
The point at which something once contained begins moving toward something unknown.
The geometry below belongs to certainty.
The movement above belongs to possibility.
Between them exists the human question.
THE LEAF AND THE FEATHER
Across the composition are forms that may resemble leaves, feathers, wings or fragments in motion.
They were intentionally allowed to remain between identities.
A leaf begins attached.
It grows from something larger than itself.
It receives nourishment through its connection.
Eventually, it separates.
But its separation does not erase the tree.
Nor does it erase the fact that it once belonged there.
Its departure becomes part of another process.
A feather carries another meaning.
It begins as part of a body.
Yet once separated, it becomes almost weightless.
It can be carried by something invisible.
Air.
A force we cannot hold, yet whose presence can be recognized through movement.
Together, these symbols represent the transition from attachment toward release.
They move from density toward lightness.
From belonging toward departure.
From physical identity toward something less defined.
They do not represent death directly.
They represent transformation.
THE CELESTIAL FORM
Above the denser geometry sits an elongated orbital shape.
It recalls celestial movement, but it is not intended to represent a literal planet.
It represents another boundary.
For much of human history, the heavens were imagined as the ultimate distance.
People looked upward and saw something unreachable.
Then knowledge expanded.
The sky became atmosphere.
Beyond it came planets.
Beyond planets came stars.
Beyond stars came galaxies.
And beyond those galaxies, more darkness, more light, more distance, more questions.
Human knowledge repeatedly reaches a boundary and then discovers something beyond it.
That idea became fundamental to MĀWARĀ-E-AFLĀK.
Perhaps the visible world is also only a boundary.
Perhaps what we currently understand about consciousness, memory and existence is incomplete.
Perhaps not.
The work deliberately leaves that uncertainty intact.
Its purpose is not to prove.
Its purpose is to wonder.
That is why the title matters.
MĀWARĀ-E-AFLĀK
Beyond the heavens.
Beyond the last boundary we currently know how to name.
