Vintage Balikesir kilim – 264 × 144 cm

There is in this Balikesir kilim a quiet generosity. That warm salmon ground stretching across 264 x 144 cm (8'8" × 4'9") like a summer light, those zigzag forms advancing from both edges towards the centre like two hands reaching out to touch, and in the middle of it all, a solitary diamond keeping watch, small and sovereign, orange and green, like an ember someone left there some 60 years ago that still burns.

One does not know whether the weaver had planned this tension between the edges that call to one another and the centre that answers. But she wove something that endures, in a natural wool that time has patinated without ever diminishing.

One of a kind.