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 surfaces of the rugs in the New Origins collection behave like small landscapes with which its creator, the textile artist Aline de Laforcade, wanted to explore the aesthetic, sensory, and execution possibilities of jute and wool in a single piece. The idea was to delve into the legacy of these two materials, so widely used in the Mediterranean throughout history, but without falling into reproducing the past. The challenge lay in achieving continuity for ancestral languages to show how they can be transformed over time through a contemporary expression.
The combination of two fibers as different as wool and jute generates a constant dialogue between the design structure of the New Origins rugs and the softness of their texture. The production must be done by weaving at different levels in an artisanal manner, in order to execute reliefs and three-dimensional volumes by varying the height of the wool pile while it is hand-knotted over the flat jute base. While the more earthy, warm, and comforting character of the jute provides depth to the pieces with its tonal variations, the wool contributes a soft and enveloping texture of great richness.
This white oval model from the New Origins collection measures 190 x 240 cm. It is also available in brown tones 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"
