Offering a perfect counterpoint to mass-produced design, Taylan Aygün’s Fictional Flora rug series stands as a testament to the enduring power of traditional craftsmanship fused with contemporary innovation.
Imagining a future where anthropogenic evolution has transformed flora, Aygün conceives dreamlike botanicals that flourish within an altered reality. Elastic stems and hybrid blossoms inhabit suspended, physics-defying landscapes, proposing an alternative ecology in which imagined plants endure as symbols of resilience and survival.
Drawing on the symbolic language of Kilim weaving — historically used to record nomadic experiences — his works become crafted archives of perseverance. Produced in collaboration with craftswomen across Anatolian villages in Türkiye, each piece is woven from locally sourced, naturally dyed wool, translating fictional botanics into coded compositions.
The Kilim thus emerges as a contemporary tapestry, binding speculative visions to inherited tradition, and suggesting, within their strangeness, a quiet optimism: that life always finds a way.
