For five years, the Dutch collective known as We Make Carpets has been blowing our minds by creating rugs from a panoply of weird, wild, and totally improbable materials. Made up of artist Bob Waardenburg and designers Marcia Nolte and Stijn van der Vleuten, We Make Carpets has made intricately designed floor coverings out of pasta, candy bars, sponges, bottles, streamers, and much, much more.
Their latest creation might be the best yet. Developed as part of a residency at De Fabriek in Eindhoven, Netherlands, Waardenburg's group folded over 20,000 letter-sized A4 sheets of paper to cover over 5,300 square feet of floor in an old industrial hall.
"The size and color of it was so entrancing," recalls Waardenburg. "When we looked at it, it looked so much like an icy lake that we had to remind ourselves that we had folded all of those papers over the course of a week ourselves. It was surreal."
Nolte, van der Vleuten and Waardenburg started designing their eccentric carpets at Dutch Design Week in 2009. As part of the Instant Nature exhibition, the group created a carpet from pinecones, sunflowers, twigs, leaves, and patches of grass. Something about the act of putting overlooked everyday objects in elaborate designs for another ignored object (the carpet) clicked with them. Waardenburg and company soon undertook a much broader series of carpet designs.
"To us, the carpet is a metaphor for everything normal that surrounds us but we never look at," Waardenburg tells Co. Design. "It's something that is in your house that you accept as part of your life and environment, but after a while escapes your critical eye. So we make our carpets out of similarly forgotten objects that everybody knows, but has ceased to look at for aesthetic value."
You can read more about We Make Carpets' work at the group's official site.