Alexandra Kehayoglou grew up in the family business you could say. Carpeting has been a family affair for generations, and Alexandra added a new twist to their expertise. The factory often has leftovers. When you make the fibre for a carpet, it’s dyed and for one carpet you have to use the same color dye. Left overs generally can’t be used, it’s too hard to recreate a certain exact color to use leftovers in another carpet. You can’t combine the colors from different dyes.
So Alexandra put the leftovers to another use: natural carpets. Nature has an abundance of different colors. Not every leaf on a tree or every piece of grass has exactly the same color as the next. Nature is diverse, nature absorbs diversity excellently. The different leftovers from the carpet production would be perfect for Alexandra to use to make these wonderful landscapes. Similar to how the impressionists would do it, each dot consists of several unique strands, together creating a uniquely colored dot.
The idea came from diorama’s she used to make. She simply blew it up to a large scale. Time stands still for a while when you look into a diorama box, like it does when you take a proper walk in the woods, or on the beach. Nature was a simple choice to make also because she grew up in a very natural environment. In Buenes Aires, people often don’t know what the nature of Argentina originally was like. They know the city, not the pastures that we’re once there.
So is it design, or art? Alexandra doesn’t know. We think you don’t have to choose. Some things simply bridge the design-art gap. She surprised her father a bit with this. He thought artists (what she is trained for) make paintings. He sees, or saw, art in a traditional sense and wasn’t expecting this when he let her use the machinery of factory. He mother isn’t from the wool world, she simply loves anything her daughter does.
