Faig Ahmed Deconstructs Traditional Azerbajani Rugs to Form Unconventional Sculptures.

Sculptures // “Carpet Equalizer,” 2012.

Installations // “Embroidered Space,” 2012.

Carpet // “Double Changes,” 2011.

Carpet // “Ledge,” 2011.

Carpet // “Flood of Yellow Weigh” 2007.

Be careful – don’t trip over Faig Ahmed’s three-dimensional rugs as they unravel before your very eyes! This Azerbaijani artist is no stranger to fibre arts – most of his work revolves around the construction and deconstruction of intricately patterned rugs and carpets. Ahmed works with various media, including painting, video and installation. To create the illusions of glitchy carpet bits, Ahmed superimposes digital patterns onto traditional weaving compositions. These combinations either create rugs with bold optical illusions and generate transformations that leave carpets looking like unconventional sculptures.

In his artist’s statement, Ahmed says “I’ve always been fond of investigating and researching every detail of anything that had interested me, and sometimes this researches reached inconceivable depths mixing up with my imagination. I’m heretofore harried by a question others have left in childhood – “what is inside?”. That’s why I’m changing habitual and visually static objects making them spatial, giving them a new depth. And this as if reveals the essence of this object – the object that was mediocre just a minute ago.

The carpet is a symbol of invincible tradition of the East, it’s a visualisation of an undestroyable icon.”

[Images courtesy of Faig Ahmed.]