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FRAMA
The Most Noble Pleasure
The roots of Terrain, our first collaboration with FRAMA, warp and weft like a woolen landscape. To understand its beauty, you must indulge in observation and remember, as Georgia O'Keeffe once wisely said, "to see takes time."
Date
September 27th, 2024
Author
Beni
Photography
James Stapleton, John Loengard / The LIFE Picture Collection
From the orphic architecture of a single seed pod to the ingenious design of a root system, Terrain pays homage to the unadorned beauty of nature and those who take the time to truly see it.
Soil and Sand in situ, photographed in Morocco by James Stapleton.
A grounding muse for this collaboration was Karl Blossfeldt's concept of "noble pleasure," an idea that honors the obvious yet often forgotten truth that nature is a balm for contemporary life today as much as it was 200 years ago. Every fallen leaf and oblong cloud is an olive branch extended from nature's maker, whoever she may be, that offers all of us an opportunity to recalibrate our nervous system. To slow down and catch and our collective breath.
Blossfeldt was a self-taught photographer with an affinity for the natural world. Over the course of his lifetime he collected, examined and magnified flora and fauna exposing each species for its intricately articulated design.
Sand, photographed on the back of a farmer in the Agafay desert.
Like Blossfeldt, Georgia O'Keeffe's name is synonymous with flowers. Throughout her illustrious career, she painted more than two hundred of them (we checked; it was glorious). That being said, her vision wasn't tunneled to blooms alone — her life and portfolio saved space for tumbleweeds, striped rocks, cracked branches, bones, and more. In her 98 years on this earth, she juiced the fruit of nature with gumption and a sort of cosmic wherewithal.
The Shell, 1934 (O'Keefe) — a spellbinding depiction of nature's story written here in shadows of charcoal on laid paper.
“The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big fat beyond my understanding – to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings
A favorite rock of Georgia's photographed for LIFE magazine.
Lofty and somewhat obtuse, all of the above is what we hope you'll take away from Terrain, a distilled series of rugs where for the first time, we've let the medium itself — and its material makeup — be the design. Because at the end of the day, it's from the soil that everything grows.