At the beginning of 2025, Arseny Mesheryakov and Igor Gurovich invited me to participate in their carpet project. It was a pleasant challenge and a long-standing desire to try my hand at a new technique. This is how the "Nine Forms of Silence" carpet series appeared.
In 2014, I made a series of collages "Chairs" with references to various literary works, mainly to poems by Brodsky. I found the collage techniques to be similar to carpet weaving, and the chairs were a great theme for decorating the house. However, the intonation and themes required a complete reimagining.
"Chairs" is a dramatic series. Silence is exactly what its name suggests: it is about creating and maintaining silence.
The carpet-making machine has a beautiful but limited palette of muted colors. This "bug" became the main feature of my silence. Additionally, the machine performs color separation and enhances contrast. Soft transitions turn into drip or glitch, but not machine-made, but somehow touching-hand, as if natural abrasions and other traces of time.
Each carpet has a name and a plot. On many, the fragments of quotes - it is fragments, as if one or two random lines, sometimes without a beginning or an end.
To add texture, I used ornaments from my own literary maps.
Well, and of course typography. Fonts — from the twenty-year-old pLatinum to the latest Foxy from the "Oh, Paris!" map and Sirin from "Berlin and Sirinъ".
I would like "Nine Forms of Silence" to be perceived as a form of quiet art - not only objects in the interior, but also paintings with their own meaning and a complex network of connections and references. They speak to you: softly, calmly, but clearly and distinctly.
