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I became obsessed with the paintings of flora and fauna by Ustad Mansur in the early 17th century. I learned that Mansur was also a great "illuminator" and that he made exquisitely detailed border decorations with plants and flowers and intricate patterns of birds and animals. I made copies of these pages, encouraging a blurring and softening of the fussy detail and removed the seductive color. I wanted to see a low-fi, graphite-gray image of the original gold and jewel-like paintings. I then made modest prints by inking etched copper plates, marveling at how the mottled vegetal pattern registered in shallow relief on fine art paper. As I scanned these prints and printed the photographs, another kind of image emerged. One with a condensation of detail, less delicate and stranger than the original. I also mixed etching inks and was struck by how the colors of my prints — the rich umber and ochre browns and pale yellows — translated into digital photographs. I separated each of the border elements from a single manuscript by Mir Ali and centered them — an extraction and distillation — to see how the smallest marginal units of composition might hold on their own.