Mona Hatoum’s Entrails Carpet

I’m taking a class in 3D fibers and today I came across Mona Hatoum’s Entrails Carpet, made from silicone rubber back in 1995. Luscious!

Entrails transforms an age-old textile form — the carpet — with unsettling effect. Hatoum’s carpets extend a visual invitation to walk or lie down, but the idea of actual contact with the sticky rubber is repellent. The body is often present in Hatoum’s work, whether represented or suggested. Entrails evokes our bodily existence at “gut level,” offering a cautionary tale about finding false comfort in something that seems familiar. Originating, as the artist says, from “a place of not belonging,” her work refuses to offer a sage haven for peaceful contemplation. Instead, deceptively elegant, mutely aggressive, it demands that we experience the often uncomfortable realities and paradoxes that define our existence.