Ala Ebtekar Luminous Ground

A short film by Griff and Keelan Williams documenting artist Ala Ebtekar's (b. 1978, San Francisco and Tehran) journey of making his monumental artwork Luminous Ground. The short film began before the global pandemic while the artist was working in a Fresno, California clay studio. It was completed in 2024 when the work was commissioned by and installed at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Luminous Ground consists of 1,800 handmade clay tiles imprinted with a vast image of the cosmos using a cyanotype process. Together, Ebtekar’s tiles display an image of deep space taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The work gives us a glimpse of billions of years into the history of the universe.