In our showroom you will find carpets from:

- Silk Ghom - Isfahan - Tabriz - Nain - Senneh - Sarough - Yalameh - Balutch - Mussel - Bidjar - Bakhtiar - Ghashgai/Shiraz - Kashan - Ardebil - Abadeh - Gabbeh/Loribaft Gabbeh - Afghan Khal Mohammad - Afghan Chobi Ziegler - Afghan Kazak

#Antique #Persian #Formal #Senneh #rug # 20002

I swear I am not actually obsessed with all things Persian (“Hockey,” part 1, part 2, and part 3, notwithstanding). Things just sometimes happen at the same time. (Having said that, though, and pardon my slight veer off-B&W-topic: I could listen to Sarah Shahi speak Farsi for DAYS.)

Senneh

The weaving, the loom, the warp, the weft, the knots, the cuts.

It is a carpet of the hunt. The miniaturist created the design at the direction of the shah, who is depicted at its center as the victorious hunter, cruel in triumph over a fallen gazelle. It is your task to reproduce this scene upon the loom. Yet you see the world differently—the miniaturist’s hunter, his hunting party, they are all men, he sees only men, while you, a woman, a woman who looks at the world through uncommon, uncanny green eyes, see women.

You see one woman in particular, a woman of the court, a woman who comes and goes past the workshop that houses your loom.

One day, her eyes meet yours. Your usually sure fingers tangle in the filament; you cast your eyes down to correct your motion. When you look up, you expect her to be gone. Instead her gaze is knowing. Your gut knots like the wool in your hands.

You know her face by heart. You know her face, so you weave her face into the carpet. A huntress, now, not a huntsman. Compassion, not cruelty.

You labor on. The carpet grows. The herati burst into bloom around its borders. Madder, saffron, indigo, archil: they color the flowers. They stain your skin.

Your nights are long. They lengthen as the carpet engulfs the loom. Until one night, the night when a low voice behind you says, “That is my face.”

You keep your hands moving, on, in, through, knotting, pulling. “Yes,” you say.

“And the gazelle has green eyes,” she says.

‘”Yes,” you say again.

Weaving, like all acts of creation, is also an act of love. You have always known this. And now she knows it too. She comes to you again the next night, and the next. The next. And on and on.