2025
20 copies
Numbered and Signed
20 copies
Numbered and Signed
11 loose signatures in a portfolio
Size: 33×23 cm
Size: 33×23 cm
If the creative process can be unraveled and rewoven, then artists Gerard & Kelly have done it with RUG.
RUG is a performance score that unfolds across eleven tactile spreads, where texture and narrative dissolve the boundaries between architecture, cinema, choreography, and art. Drawing from Gerard & Kelly’s film “E for Eileen”, shot in Eileen Gray’s modernist villa E-1027 in the south of France, RUG reflects on the legacy of this singular architect and designer while presenting a manifesto for interdisciplinary art-making.
The eleven signatures, each named after one of Gray’s iconic rugs, bring together stills from Gerard & Kelly’s film, deconstructed rug patterns, and original plans of the E-1027 house and furniture. A poem written by the artists unfolds across the eleven spreads in hand-stenciled text. All of these elements are meticulously arranged for maximum resonance, serving as notations for choreography and musical improvisation.
RUG expands the artists’ trajectory, which often flows from scores to performances to films to objects. Here, the book is a prelude to yet-unrealized performances. The result is a layered, looping conversation between past and future, creation and reinterpretation.
As with Gray’s own work, the materiality of RUG is paramount. Printed on Oyster paper, which has a pearlescent surface evoking seashells from the Mediterranean Sea near E-1027, the colors are applied using stencils with gouache, echoing Gray’s artisanal methods. Film stills are printed via an HP Indigo press, their precision offset by the irregularity of the hand-stenciled designs. A contemporary stencil font, KLOD by Adrien Menard—with its clean lines recalling Gray’s typographic experiments at E-1027—deepens the dialogue between eras.
Presented in a silkscreened folder tied shut with fabric ribbons, RUG recalls the portfolios architects once carried—plans neatly bound yet filled with latent possibilities. The ribbons nod to Eileen Gray’s and Jean Badovici’s “Maison en bord de mer” portfolio from 1929, binding the project in a shared language of craft and utility.
RUG is a continuation of the artists’ broader project, exploring themes of memory, subjectivity, and history through an interdisciplinary lens. By collaborating with Gray across time and medium, Gerard & Kelly expand the idea of authorship, treating her legacy as both inspiration and partner.
In RUG, the past is not static; it moves. Gray’s rugs—once silent witnesses to the life within E-1027—become performance scores, their designs activated by the body. Gerard & Kelly’s work here is not just a tribute but a provocation: How do we inhabit history? How do we make it move? If RUG is any indication, the answer lies somewhere between buildings and bodies, structure and improvisation, the digital and the handmade.
RUG is not merely a book to be read; like Gray’s architecture, it projects a space to be lived in.
Three Star Books extends its gratitude to Victoria Brooks for her skilled and dedicated assistance in the production of RUG.
