1991Carpets 1991 – 94

The carpet is also an arena within which our social and private lives are staged. While sumptuous carpets are agents of pleasure through the soles of our feets, as well as our eyes, the deep-pile carpet has become the cartoonists’ status. We position not only our furniture but also ourselves and others in the territory of the carpet. And as carpets are so much to do with putting and keeping things in their place, this also functions as a metaphor for wider frameworks of social correctness. After all, to be ‘on the carpet’ is to be called to order and disciplined. Carpets are one of the frames within which social life is composed according to conventions of propriety.
David Ward, 1994