9'5" x 13'5" Indian Modern Rug | Wool | Charcoal

A rectangular rug of 9'5" x 13'5", large enough to carry a seating group with the sofa legs on the pile, knotted in India in wool. There is one colour in it and nothing else. The pattern is cut into the surface rather than dyed into it, so from standing height the rug reads as a plain dark floor and only shows its drawing when the light crosses it at an angle.

Design

The modern drawing is an all-over field of rounded, pebble-like cells, some closed and egg-shaped, some stretched into long leaf forms, packed edge to edge with no repeat you can easily trace. The outlines are cut down into the pile and the shapes left standing slightly proud, a carved relief of perhaps a few millimetres, clearest in the raking-light photographs of the corner and along the folded edge. There is no border and no medallion. The pattern runs straight off all four sides into a narrow selvedge, and in the flat overhead shots the relief thins out towards the middle of the field so that the centre appears almost empty and the ends and long sides carry most of the visible texture.

Colour

One tone throughout: a deep charcoal that is not a cool blue-grey but a charcoal with brown in it, closer to bitter chocolate in the close-up of the pile and to a dark olive-brown where the studio lights strike the top of the carved shapes. The single colour is what makes the relief work. The cut outlines hold shadow and read almost black, the raised shapes catch light and lift a shade or two towards taupe, and the whole surface shifts between those two readings as you walk around it. The reverse, seen in the folded corner, is a flatter and slightly greyer version of the same tone.

Making

Hand-knotted, with a wool pile clipped fairly short and then carved back further along the pattern lines, which is what gives the sculpted surface. The back photograph shows an even, regular knotting across the width, and the pile has the dense, slightly crisp handle of a firmly packed weave. The rug is new and the condition is recorded as perfect, with full pile, straight sides and a clean overcast edge.