Carpetstory, the hand-knotted rug atelier founded in Jaipur in 2001, has launched Meridian: thirty rugs drawn from the Jantar Mantar, the stone observatory Sawai Jai Singh II built at the heart of his new city in the 1720s. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and at its centre stands one of the largest stone sundials ever made.
The instruments were built to read the sky: quadrants, arcs, graduated scales, the long edge of a shadow. They were made to be exact rather than beautiful, and they turned out to be both. Three hundred years on, they are still the most modern shapes in Jaipur. Meridian draws them the way an architect would, with no ornament, and knots them by hand in the same city.
The collection runs in three chapters. First Light is the quiet one: a single line, a single curve, one colour. The Shadow Hours takes the geometry of the instruments themselves, the quadrants and blades and the shadows they throw. After Dark turns to the sky they were built to read, in deep colour and silk.
Each rug is hand-knotted in hand-spun New Zealand wool with mulberry silk accents on a cotton warp, at 6 to 14 knots per inch, and spends 6 to 10 months on the loom. Every piece is made to order in any size. Several are woven in the shape of the instrument they come from: Samrat is a quarter circle, Chakra a pair of rings.
“The Jantar Mantar is still the most modern thing in Jaipur. It was built to be exact, and it turned out to be beautiful. We wanted rugs that work the same way.”
Aashrit Garg, CEO, Carpetstory
Meridian is shown as renderings, because each piece is woven to order. The photographs further down are earlier Carpetstory rugs in clients’ homes.
