This limited-edition laser etching has been produced by artist Sukaina Kubba and DCA Print Studio to coincide with Turn Me Into a Flower; the first major show in a UK institution from the Toronto-based artist. The exhibition debuts a new body of work created during a production residency with DCA Print Studio.

Kubba is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is strongly rooted in material and cultural research, storytelling, and drawing connections. The artist works with industrial and packaging materials, and explores traveling objects, textiles and vehicles as carriers of cross-cultural histories. Her practice spans the mediums of drawing, painting, printmaking, fibres, audio, video and installation, and interrogates narratives of cultural and material assimilation and appropriation.

The artist’s recent research into Persian rugs through family and domestic encounters, fictional stories and collections seeks to transmit narratives of their travel, trade and acquisition into collections. Her work invokes the history of these rugs: their origins, extraction, manufacture, packaging and trade, and deployment of their textures and visual properties.

As with the other commissioned works in Turn Me Into a Flower, this black laser etching is based on a tracing Kubba drew of a document at the Stoddard-Templeton Design archive at the University of Glasgow. Their archive drawers house Victorian era tracings of Persian and other ‘Oriental’ rugs made by the designers at the Stoddard-Templeton factory. The archives mark a historic moment in the colonial appropriation of traditional crafts from British colonies into mechanised manufacture in Scotland.

The drawing depicts Iranian flora and fauna (such as Caspian tigers and nightengales) and common rug motifs such as the medallion. By etching almost to the full depth of the dark black Somerset paper, the images visually alternate between a velvety and a lace-like texture, harking back to the textiles imitated by the Stoddard-Templeton designers.

This pair of prints mark the culmination of the first print production residency collaboration between DCA Print Studio and DCA Exhibitions.

This print is available individually or as a set.