Kour Pour UK, b. 1987

As its title suggests, this Persian carpet painting by Kour Pour is meant to evoke feelings of safety and comfort. As with Pour’s large-scale carpet paintings, the composition harkens back to his Iranian heritage and is rooted in the intercultural fostering of images, materials, and techniques from throughout Asia and Europe. The intimate scale of this smaller work is modeled after a once-iconic consumer product of the digital age: a computer mouse pad. Years ago, when Pour first started making carpet paintings, people would bring him gifts of mouse pads printed with carpet designs on them. He recalls how funny it was to see these little digitally printed carpet images sourced from pictures on the internet that were scanned from books. That process felt so interconnected with the cultural transfer that Pour was already thinking about in the studio. He thought about how these little mouse pads could be rolled up and taken from place to place, just like carpets. Through this small-scale carpet painting, which is the same size as a mouse pad, Pour is revisiting this memory. The work is made using the same complex techniques that he employs for his large-scale carpet paintings. He first researches source images in search of an iconic Persian carpet design dating back centuries, with deep intercultural legacies. He then photographs the design and makes modifications to that image before burning the new image onto a screen to later transfer onto the surface of his painting. Before he makes the transfer, he prepares the surface with multiple interlocking layers of gesso, applied vertically and then horizontally with a broom or brush, creating a surface reminiscent of the woven pattern that would be found on a traditional carpet. The screenprint is then transferred to the surface, after which Pour takes turns sanding it and hand painting over it, alternately adding and erasing sections of the image. Those erasures and additions echo the rewriting of history inherent in the visual language of Persian carpets, while the precious scale and mobility of these small carpet paintings carry the same sentiment as a carpet—a movable object that you can carry with you on a journey and unpack at your new destination as a visual and material marker of home.