Beyond All Measures is an exploration of color, material, and perception through the oxidation of metal. Al Mazrou’s research begins with the horizon, a line that traditionally anchors landscape painting by marking the point where sky meets land or sea. For her, the horizon is less a pictorial device and more a metaphorical threshold, a place where realities, perspectives, and systems of orientation meet. It becomes the site where perception confronts its own limits, shaped by forces that often exceed our control.

Historically, the horizon played a central role in navigation. It determined what could be seen, communicated, or understood. Beyond it there was only silence. As Hito Steyerl writes ‘the horizon allowed a person to locate themselves in relation to the world, to understand position, direction, and ambition. It offered a sense of order in a constantly shifting environment’.

Yet this sense of stability was always fragile. Instruments such as the astrolabe, quadrant, and sextant refined the ability to orient oneself using the horizon and the stars, but sailors still stood on surfaces that were never fully steady. The horizon remained, in many ways, a projection, a constructed idea of stability. Artificial horizons were eventually created to simulate what was never completely there. This condition mirrors our present moment, shaped by expanding digital networks, global systems of power, and interconnected virtual landscapes that promise infinite space while unsettling the very notion of grounding.

The word groundless becomes important here. It suggests uncertainty, flux, and an openness to questioning what has long been considered fixed. It describes the conceptual space in which this work operates, a space where materials, perceptions, and meanings remain in continuous motion.

Copper, with its ability to transform, becomes the medium through which these ideas unfold. Its natural oxidation produces colors that evoke the gradations of a horizon. When exposed to heat and oxidizing gases, copper reveals luminous tones that shimmer across its surface. These temper colors were once considered flaws in traditional manufacturing. I approach them instead as expressions of transition, instability, and possibility.

Each copper sheet is melted down, cast into a textured tile, and guided through an oxidation process that brings out a spectrum of shifting hues. These tiles come together to form a diptych creating a horizon like field that refuses to remain still. The colors alter with the movement of light, suggesting both the idea of infinite space and the collapse of any single point of orientation.

As Steyerl reflects ‘when the horizon breaks apart, the familiar coordinates of subject and object, and of time and space, begin to drift’. This work lives within that moment of falling, where the horizon is no longer a fixed line but a moving and shimmering surface. Beyond All Measures becomes a meditation on perception without anchors, on the beauty that emerges from instability, and on the search for orientation in a world that no longer promises solid ground.