Co-Curator of "Banners of Persuasion" at Design Miam
WHITEWALL: Tell me about the Rug Company and how you became interested in working with artists to design tapestries.
CHRISTOPHER SHARP: We started the Rug Company ten years ago, my wife and myself, and it started off as a little shop selling traditional and antique rugs. What we found after a while was that it wasn’t particularly interesting – it was all retrospective. So we decided to do a contemporary collection and worked with fashion designers like Diane Von Furstenberg and Armani.
We wanted to work with artists but rugs only work well with a print. For an artist it wasn’t the right medium. I thought it was interesting to use the tapestry model and approach contemporary artists.
WW: How did you go about selecting artists for this project?
CS: We chose people we liked, we wanted it to be very broad, international, and in some cases it was an obvious connection to textile like Shazia Sikander who is from Pakistan and Ghada Amer whose work is stitching on paper. And then people I just thought would translate well.
WW: It took three years to complete this project, that’s a huge endeavor. How were the tapestries made?
CS: The Paul Noble took well over a year to complete. It took several tries to get the right shades of grey. We set it up in China with thirty ladies and they stitch by hand line by line from the bottom.
WW: Did you have a theme in mind for the show? What criteria did you give for the artist in their design?
CS: The actual subject matter was up to them. We showed them the options of different types of thread – silk, acrylic – and stitching. We were very careful to make sure none of the artists knew what the other artists were doing. And what they came up with is extremely diverse.
WW: Why were you interested in bringing tapestry to contemporary artists? There have been hints of a resurgence in interest in textiles and craft with the recent show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of African Textiles and the opening of the Museum of Art and Design in New York.
CS: And other people like Chuck Close have done tapestries recently. It was once a popular medium that died out because of the sheer expense and amount of time it takes to execute.
WW: Are any of the tapestries for sale?
CS: We’re going to make five of each. We’ve sold most of the first editions, about half of the second editions, though none of them have been made. We’ve managed to make one of each and slowly over the next three years we’ll do the rest. I think it would be nice to carry on showing it. We’ve shown it in London and we’d like to show it in New York and Dubai and pair it with those fairs as we did here in Miami.
