Multicolor Handwoven Wool Oushak Kilim

Oushak is how English has always spelled Uşak, the western Anatolian town that supplied the rugs European painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries laid under their sitters' feet. Most things carrying the name are knotted pile.

01Coming off the loom

This is not one of them: it is a flat handwoven kilim in wool, multicolored, 119 × 188 cm (3'11" × 6'2"), and it came off a village loom rather than out of a workshop. The field is built from horizontal registers, each one a different width, each holding a different family of small figures — diamonds, hooks, combs, the vocabulary a weaver assembles from what she knows rather than from a design sheet.

02What Wool does

Color arrives in blocks and changes when the yarn changes. Reds and dark blues carry most of the weight and a cream register or two opens the composition up so the eye has somewhere to rest. Wool throughout, worked flat, with the pattern made entirely by weft. A kilim that has spent years folded keeps the fold for a while, and the useful thing to do with one is to give it a week or two lying flat before judging how it sits; wool has a memory and it does eventually let go.

03The memory of a region

Washing is a job for someone with a rug plant, not a bathtub. Handwoven in wool in the Uşak — Oushak — region of western Türkiye. Flat-woven with weft-faced patterning; no pile. Horizontal registers of diamonds, hooks and combs. 119 × 188 cm (3'11" × 6'2") — a small sitting room or a landing. Give it time lying flat to lose its fold lines. Professional washing. A village weaving, and there is one. Oushak's reputation was built on pile, and a flatweave from the same district is the cheaper way to own the drawing.