Contemporary Art Rugs – About Land Rugs

 

ALL OUR rugs are ethically produced, hand woven in Nepal by highly skilled Nepalese and Tibetan weavers using traditional methods to produce designer art rugs. Long lasting, traditional Tibetan wools are used in factories that are free of child labour.

The art rug designs are by the British Modernist artist Pip Benveniste (1921- 2010).

Land Rugs was established in 2011 and is run from Bristol, UK. We are registered with GoodWeave, a global non-profit organisation working to end child labour in the handmade carpet industry and offering educational opportunities to children, as well as better conditions for adult weavers. The GoodWeave label on all our rugs ensures the ethical origins of these beautiful art rugs. In 2014 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the founder of GoodWeave, Kailash Satyarthi.

Land Rugs sponsors additional educational activities in Nepal by choosing to donate 5% of its sales to GoodWeave.

Land Rugs has operated and sold art rugs from its Bristol base since January 2011. It offers hand-knotted rugs, made in Nepal by craftsmen and women (read about the weaving process) and imported to the UK, or exported from Nepal to any country in the world.

All our art rug designs are hand woven. Though these processes look simple, they all require a high degree of expertise and only the hands that are trained for generations are capable of producing the high quality of weaving that we still see today.

See Press Release from Land Rugs.

Individual rugs cost £700 per square metre, delivered free in the UK.

For example, a 213cm x 152cm rug (7′ x 5′) costs £2268.

The full price list is available as a pdf – see Price List

Artist designed rugs

Our art rugs are all designs of Pip Benveniste (1921-2010). The Guardian said of her paintings that the ‘… colours float, move and breathe, and her abstractions are landscaped-based just as the work of the St Ives painters (in Cornwall) was, though she claimed no adherence to them.’

Resurgence Magazine described Benveniste as ‘the unusual artist who has sought all her life to discover that anonymous but expressive signature of cycles within nature’.

You may well be looking for a rug to go on your floor … have you ever considered having a rug on the wall? Benveniste’s rug designs have been hung in exhibitions, offices and homes over the years and look stunning in this vertical elevation. There are, of course, traditions over many centuries across the world for hanging beautiful weavings and tapestries, giving a different perspective.

But if it’s a floor rug you want, then Land Rugs designs can meet your needs – the rugs are long lasting and we offer great flexibility with sizes to suit your setting. Remember, many of the designs in the Gallery can be repeated as a runner for your hallway or corridor. Whichever you choose, we hope you will agree that the fine designs and the high quality of hand weaving by Nepalese and Tibetan craftsmen and women will give you an attractive and professionally produced product – an unusual work of art in your home or office.

Contact us to discuss this idea further.

Inspired art legacies

The daughter of Bohemian artists, Benveniste was born into the creative community of writers, artists, potters and actors in Newlyn, Cornwall. Creating rug designs came towards the end of Benveniste’s wide-ranging artistic career. Artist-designed, hand-knotted art rugs were an addition to her career as a British modernist painter. She took a life-long inspiration from eastern cultures, particularly Tibet, Japan and China and worked across a wide range of mediums, including oil, acrylic, watercolour, etching, black and white photography and colour film.

The natural world was her constant companion and source of energy throughout her 60 years working as an artist. Her designing of rugs, to be hand woven firstly in India, and now in Nepal, started in the 1990s and continues following her death.

In one sense, the Land Rugs project was a return to Benveniste’s Newlyn roots, inspiring her to design ‘English Garden’, ‘Magic’, ‘Near & Far’ and ‘Three Wheels’ among many others in Gallery One (see the gallery). Colour was a life-long ally in her search for what she described as ‘nature’s signature’ and this theme is brought out even further in Galleries Two, Three and Four, which more portray what The Guardian described as Benveniste’s skill in ‘translating light into paint’.

Landscapes from Cornwall to Mexico, from Norfolk to Tunisia inspired her to lay down an ever growing matrix of interconnecting themes to illustrate the continuum of birth, growth, decay, death and re-birth in the natural world.

These ideas are explored along with many others in Benveniste’s rug designs hand-knotted and crafted by weavers in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, a region of the world which echoes the wide-ranging path of enquiry and disciplined work output of the artist.

Read more about the inspiration for Land Rugs in Pip Benveniste.