A Map of Somewhere High
Four and a half metres of cream,
and across it, a few brown lines
that could be paths, or ridgelines,
or the way home drawn from memory.
This is the big one. Four metres forty of undyed Beni Ourain wool, knotted in the 1960s for a house that must have had a room to match, and across all that cream a loose, open lattice in charcoal brown, the lines wandering a little as hand-drawn lines do. Look at it from above and it is a map: ridges, passes, a valley or two. The weaver would have known those shapes. She lived in them.
Sixty years have mellowed the ivory to the colour of old paper and left the brown lines crisp. Thirty kilos of it. It is a rug for a serious room, a long dining room, a studio, a loft with the furniture pushed to the walls, and for someone who understands that the best thing you can put on a floor sometimes is almost nothing, at scale.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.