Course title:

Design as Devotion

Course description:

House of Gul presents a workshop to help drop unconscious habits, awaken the inner life, and build a creative home for expressing your highest self. Together we will explore the realms of art, design, and devotion, using beauty as a portal to contemplate God, ancestry, and the unseen forces that hold us. This work highlights ancient spiritual practices and explores our contemporary design work (commercial and cultural) through a conceptual framework of translation: translating inner states into form, ancestral memory into contemporary language, and spiritual longing into visual presence. Our design language draws from the coexistence of softness and strength, the sacred intelligence of ornament, and the ways nature, light, color, and geometry echo divine order and universal love.
This immersive workshop invites artists, designers, and seekers into a contemplative creative practice that bridges meditation, spiritual presence, and visual expression. Rooted in the design philosophy of House of Gül and the artistic practice of Ali Godil, we will explore how inner states—joy, love, longing, remembrance, and divine connection—can be translated into form, color, pattern, and composition.
Participants will be guided through meditative and breath-based practices to quiet the mind, open the heart, and attune to subtle perception. From this inward listening, we will learn to access inspiration as a spiritual creative transmission rather than an intellectual exercise, allowing intuition, memory, and sacred imagination to shape the creative process. The workshop emphasizes beauty as a devotional act: a way of witnessing the invisible and giving it visual form.
Through a blend of guided meditation, reflective writing, and hands-on art and design exercises, students will explore how to channel emotion and spirit into their work using ancient and contemporary practices

Bio:

Ali Van Godil is a designer, artist, and creative director who believes in the power of beauty (ethics + aesthetics) to create universally harmonious art, designs and productions. Pushing culture forward and ultimately using design and art as a modality for raising consciousness and joy in the human experience. He works internationally while based in Oregon and New York.
He is the founder of House of Gul, a creative studio and artistic practice that works on commercial projects as well as artistic collaborations. He’s worked on creative projects for a diverse range of clients, from Nike, Adobe, Netflix, and Facebook to many regional and international non-profit organizations and cultural institutions.
His practice explores the emotional and spiritual architecture of belonging, how memory, migration, landscape, and sacred tradition shape identity and inner life. Rooted in a Pakistani upbringing, informed by Islamic and Indian spiritual philosophy, and deeply influenced by the natural world of Oregon, the work reflects a lifelong dialogue between earth and transcendence, body and soul, tradition and becoming. Expressing universal love with God through light and movement.
Across his art practice and studio, House of Gül, he works at the intersection of art, design, and devotion, using beauty as a portal to contemplate God, ancestry, and the unseen forces that hold us. The conceptual framework of his work centers on translation: translating inner states into form, ancestral memory into contemporary language, and spiritual longing into visual presence. He is drawn to the coexistence of softness and strength, the sacred intelligence of ornament, and the ways nature, light, color, and geometry echo divine order and universal love.