Kidderminster Rug
Everyone in my family still lives in the Stourbridge in West Midlands—most of them still live on one housing estate—so moving to London 10 years ago was viewed as somewhat bucking the trend. My family is very supportive of me but I think many of them, particularly the older generations, don’t necessarily understand most of the things I get up to, so I decided I wanted to create something that they could easily wrap their heads around. As Stourbridge is famous for its glass production in the 19th century I thought about giving that a go, but it turns out that glassblowing is actually dead hard and you can’t, and shouldn’t, do it in a one bed flat. Kidderminster (the town next door to Stourbridge), however, was the centre of carpet production in the Victorian era and is now home to The Museum of Carpet. If I were to ring up my Nan tomorrow and tell her I had a piece in White Cube, I think she would be proud, but she probably wouldn’t know why that was in any way significant. But if I were to ring her up and tell her I had a piece in theThe Museum of Carpet, I think she would be blown away , and that’s why I have made a rug with the express intention of getting it displayed inThe Museum of Carpet.
The rug is an abstract map of Kidderminster town centre and I have marked the landmarks that I find most significant to me personally. Most of my experience of Kidderminster happened when I was 17/18— old enough to drive, but too skint to go to the pub. Kidderminster is therefore what I like to think of as a destination. There in blue, the 24hr Tesco. Yellow and red is the famous drive through Mcdonalds, and the pink dot nestled up the side of Morrisons is The Museum of Carpet. “YOU ARE HERE” a label should say in the museum.
The Museum is absolutely not aware of what I’m doing and actually may not appreciate me strong-arming them into displaying my work (work which is in no way historically noteworthy), but I hope that if they won’t do it for me, they’ll do it for Nan.
UPDATE: They don’t want it.
Tufted rug; airedale rug yarn and monks cloth.
195x128cm
