unknown
ʌnˈnəʊnadjective
Not known or familiar
‘Explore unknown territory’
Not known or familiar
‘Explore unknown territory’
A carpet transpires in secret over weeks and years. It takes shape and spirit, adapts colours, and appears to be deep without weighing down, serious without darkening the mind.
The studio is called Unknown. The mark is that word, written and rewritten until it stops being readable.
The word for unknown, written in the Persian hand.
The same word, in Urdu — the script that surrounds the studio in Jaipur.
Redrawn in square Kufic, where every letter is built on a grid and reading becomes a matter of looking.
Each Kufic character has more than one form. These are the alternates the mark was chosen from.
The letters, set and spaced until the word is no longer legible as a word. What is left is a code, and the studio’s mark.
Unknown is a hand-knotted carpet studio in Jaipur, Rajasthan, founded by Alejandra Domínguez and Abhinav Sethi. Carpets have been made here for three decades. Over those years, alongside craftsmanship and a good deal of experimentation, the studio has developed its own dyeing and knotting styles — among them a variation of the Turkish knot that belongs to this house alone.
The colour comes from plants and minerals of India. The fibre is hand-spun silk, wool and linen. What happens between yarn, dye, temperature and finish is where the work actually lives, and it rewards a constant curiosity: the beauty of making the material that will become a carpet.
We admire the inconsistency offered by nature and by the material itself. The unpredictable nature of the fibre lets each carpet take on its own character — delicate, unrepeatable, organic, a long way from the industrial.
An Unknown carpet is like a living tree, with all its layers of natural wool and silk, raw thread and pigment drawn from the earth. To place one in a house is to introduce a presence that breathes.
बदलाव से ज़्यादा स्थिर कुछ भी नहीं। मैं असंगत हूँ, ख़ुद अपने लिए भी।
There is nothing so stable as change. I am inconsistent, even to myself.
मैं बस मैं ही हो सकता हूँ, जो भी वह है।
All I can do is be me, whoever that is.