Tehran Foundry

Tehran Foundry works in a small sand-casting shop where bronze is poured the way it has been for generations — by hand, in batches, cooled slowly enough to read the grain in the finished surface. Their signature move is to take a single letter out of a line of nastaliq calligraphy, isolate its curve and counter-curve, and cast it at a scale where the eye reads a torso or a spine before it reads an Arabic-script character. The foundry works from source manuscripts and printed calligraphy, choosing letters for the shape of their movement rather than the word they belong to. Surfaces are left with a raw patina — no polish, no lacquer — so the bronze ages the way outdoor sculpture does. Pieces reach All The Good Things through a screened export partner working out of Tehran.

Tehran Foundry casts calligraphic form in bronze — single letters lifted out of a line of nastaliq script and given weight, so the eye reads them as a body before it reads them as a word.

Tehran, Iran

That a single letter, cast at the right scale, can read as a body before it reads as language.