Aline de Laforcade is a French textile artist based in Ibiza whose work explores the potential of raw Mediterranean fibers, including wool, hemp, linen, and reclaimed natural materials. Her work ranges from sculptural murals to textile panels and spatial interventions with a vocation to interact with contemporary architecture. Interested in fibers and ancestral weaving techniques, as well as in vernacular architecture and ways of life, her works stand out for their powerful expressive force that moves between the ancestral, the organic, the aesthetic, and the contemporary, showing themselves at times structured and harmonic and, at others, chaotic and wild.
The mixture of two fibers with such different characters as wool and jute generates a constant dialogue in the rugs of the New Origins collection between the structure of their design and the softness to the touch of their volumetric textures. While jute is a more earthy, warm, and comforting fiber that provides depth to the pieces with its tonal variations, wool provides a soft, rich, and enveloping texture.
To be able to execute its reliefs and three-dimensional volumes, the production must be done by weaving at different levels in an artisanal manner, varying the height of the wool pile while it is hand-knotted over the flat jute base. In this way, the surfaces of the rugs in the New Origins collection manage to transmit the sensation of being like small landscapes, where the materials themselves shape their visual language.
With this proposal, the textile artist Aline de Laforcade has echoed the tactile legacy of these two materials, so widely used throughout history in the Mediterranean, but without falling into reproducing the past. The idea was, rather, to achieve continuity for ancestral languages, exploring how these can be transformed over time, generating a link between ancestral knowledge and contemporary design.
The oval model in brown tones from the New Origins collection measures 190 x 240 cm. It is also available in white and in a larger rectangular format: 216 x 300 cm.
New Origins is a model from our Hand Knotted rug collection
The hand knotted technique—which means knotted by hand—is a manual production method for rugs that allows for designs with great detail precisely because it is done knot by knot. It is a very laborious technique and, consequently, offers great flexibility of line. Bearing this peculiarity in mind, at GAN we project rugs to be made with this technique both with a uniform design and with an apparent randomness in the pattern.
Manufacturing technique
Hand Knotted + Hand Loom
Material
Fibre composition: 70% undyed wool and 30% jute
Sizes
190x240 cm / 6'3"x7'11"
Approx. total height
12 - 50 mm / 0.47" - 1.97"
