What would a garden become if the ground itself could be folded, carried and unrolled somewhere else?
The invitation
The Metropolitan Museum’s Garden Carpet, made in Iran in the second half of the eighteenth century, translates cultivated space into textile. Garden is not merely its name; it is a way of organising the world underfoot.
A carpet can turn the floor into a place imagined rather than simply occupied. Paths become a visual decision. A border becomes the limit of a world.
No single viewpoint
Unlike a painting hanging ahead of us, the carpet asks for movement: looking down, stepping away, approaching again. Its garden has no fixed horizon. That makes it both practical and strange.
A garden usually contains a visitor. Here the visitor contains the garden in a glance, then loses it again while moving across the surface.
Garden Carpet
Maker unknown · Second half of the 18th century
Wool-pile carpet · Iran
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
