Karoo Looms Entoptics

The Entoptics rug collection draws its inspiration from the ancient visual language of South Africa's pre-colonial hunter gatherer San and herder Khoe Peoples. 

Their stories, observations and beliefs were etched, pecked and scraped into the shiny desert-varnished "blinkklippe" of the landscape. 

Across the Great Karoo, these enduring engravings form a remarkable record of human creativity and connection to place. 

Dots, lines, spirals, grids, zigzags and figurative forms appear alongside animals, human figures and other symbols. 

This visual vocabulary is shaped by the landscape and through different ways of seeing the world.

We have explored that idea of 'seeing' and focused on the abstract patterns experienced within the eye during trance and altered states of consciousness. 

The Entoptics Rug Collection is not a reproduction of the past, but a creative dialogue with it, carrying the imagery of an ancestral story to be retold by Karoo craftswomen with direct lineage to this rich Khoesan heritage of South Africa.

Perhaps the meeting of paths and the unseen choreography of life, is what makes the Entoptics particularly meaningful in bringing the Collection to fruition: a creative unity where difference becomes possibility and many hands become one expression.

A collaboration between Dr Brian Hodgson Rademeyer, whose lifelong connection to the Karoo has led him to explore and document its ancient KhoeSan rock engravings, Sophia Pruim Booley and the Women of the Karoo Looms Weavery, who bring these ancient indigenous visual motifs to life through contemporary handwoven textiles using natural fibres. 

True to the ethos of weaving - a craft rooted in heritage, tradition, skill and pride - we honour the knowledge held within the craft and carry it forward into the present. The weaves become more than just beautiful objects, they carry a sense of belonging,  community pride, cultural memory and energy which is transferred from the hands, stories and landscapes that shape them.