Down Under: What’s afoot with warp and weft?

In her new collection, The Depths, rug designer Vicki Simon introduces a compelling repertoire of undersea creatures. Angry Fish, Food Chain (inset, left), and Dunkleosteus owe their naive line quality to her eight-year-old son, Tate, who originally drew them with markers. At New York City’s ICFF in late May, where Simon’s rugs were displayed, other carpets also featured hand-drawn motifs: Glasgow’s Timorous Beasties (the rising rock stars of the international interiors world), contributed Thistle (inset, facing page), a Gothic-inspired black botanical exploding across a blood-red field, for Christopher Farr.
Simon notes the emergence of more organic-looking rugs this season, implicating in her assessment their materials and methods (undyed wool and Tibetan manufacturing, for example), as well as the designs: Representations of trees, flowers, and other natural subjects are ubiquitous.
The innocence conveyed by The Depths belies its complex creation: Drawings are transferred to monk’s cloth using an overhead projector so the image is correctly oriented. The cotton fabric is stretched and nailed to a vertical rack. In a considerably rigorous exercise, hand-held tufting guns fasten plied and felted yarn into the fabric’s holes from the back until the expanse is covered. Cutting and shearing then occurs on the opposite side. These rugs are kept one inch thick, a luxury marking them for residences rather than contract use, and inviting their users (potentially including children) to sit on them. Latex is applied to the back of the pliable textile as a stablizer and a polypropylene mesh tops that to form a secondary backing. The rug’s edges are clipped, folded, and secured with binding.
Merida’s Metropolitan Collection (background images) also exploits the felted process, yielding a denser, softer product and employs clumped yarn pieces (1/8 inch in diameter) rather than thinner spun plies. The company’s offerings—some recently added to MoMA’s design collection—are looped or cut, with both versions resembling yet another type of organic style: carefully cultivated dreadlocks.