The ‘Carpet Pieces’

The way I’ve always tried to describe the carpet piece is as a three-dimensional drawing where you have these unfinished sculptures most of the time, and here you have a lot of traces in the carpet. The idea related to drawing in my view is that when the sculpture is not completed, when you leave it at an in progress stage, you somehow expect the viewer to complete that image in their mind; you expect that there is a kind of platform established, as if you start exchanging messages on a white piece of paper, draw a map in the street or quickly try to give a message through drawing. Very often you won’t finish it or complete the idea, which is what happens in the case of the carpet pieces; that’s why I deliberately don’t finish the sculptures or why I leave them sometimes quite abstract. I think that gives a lot of space for people to meet my ideas in a kind of in-between space, where they can imagine what that figure would be.
More recently I’ve been finding out that the figures in the carpet have become more and more abstract and more and more unplanned. This is another issue with this piece: it’s been done quite a few times now and I was always questioning if I should keep on doing this work or not. The reason why I decided to continue for the time being is that I wanted to challenge myself not to plan what was going to happen, to leave it quite open, which was rather disheartening sometimes.
The piece usually takes about seven days to be installed and constricted. The first days are about gathering the fibre. I always have someone help and then I stay on the piece with someone (or sometimes on my own) and start playing anthropomorphic games again and doing shapes and saying, oh this looks like a head of an animal or a figure or an abstract figure. Then I start moving to other figures and relating the images to each other in the space, so in a way during the process I start creating a narrative for the piece, which obviously doesn’t have to be the narrative that is on the viewer’s mind. That’s why I’m talking about this open area for an exchange of messages.
For example, for this piece in ICA, I came up with the title ‘Fleeting Luck’, basically because the animals were related to luck in different cultures, like the rabbit’s paw for the Western or the cat for the Japanese or the monkey for the Chinese. Obviously lots of those animals, like the fox or the rabbit, appear and disappear in our eyes very, very quickly, like the squirrels in the countryside or urban landscape. This was the first work I decided to give a title. For most of them, I just relate the title to the colour of the carpet.
The reason why I’m showing this particular image is because this carpet I did in Japan was the first one in an open space. It was in a really large warehouse by the sea, close to the port in Yokohama. I tried to do for the first time this huge piece of carpet in the open space, because from what I’ve observed in Japan, in the parks they all gather together in groups, sometimes organised by age or sex, and they have lunch together and sit around this mat and take their shoes off. I wanted to play with this idea inside of a warehouse. The placement of the sculptures would follow some kind of Japanese garden way of staging, because again, I was walking around during the week trying to gather some kind of local experience to develop that piece.
This was a second work with a title: ‘Jealous of the Sea’. You’ve got the suggesting front, you get outside of the door and then you have the sea in front of you and the sea is a very meditative place. People stay quite a long time looking and thinking about things they wouldn’t share with others. I borrowed the title from a Portuguese writer; in one part of the book there is this young woman who he would like to be with, and he tells her about being ‘jealous of the sea’, because only the sea knows her thoughts.