GRANDMA PATTERNS RUGS
By Wild Animals, 2025

Rop van Mierlo, founder of Wild Animals, does not draw wild animals; he lets them happen. The ones in his classic children’s book Wild Animals (2011) are unmistakable — a bear, a monkey, a pig, a lion, a parrot. Yet their forms are softer, hazier than anything in nature. Van Mierlo’s creatures are unpredictable; making them is an exercise in surrender. To draw a wild animal, to capture it in linework, felt to him like another form of control. “How could I draw an animal without controlling it?” The answer was wet-on-wet. A method that leaves space for chance, where pigment can move as it pleases. “The paint bleeds everywhere, and before you know it, you’re finished,” he once said. For the Italian design company cc-tapis, Van Mierlo has now translated his masterful blurring technique into a collection of five rugs, all handmade in India. Grandma Patterns brings his wild approach home: tartan, the plaid of grandmothers, the fabric of comfort and domesticity. Bringing a playfulness to this heritage print, he applies the same wet-on-wet technique, painting geometric forms on a wet surface, watching them dissolve, waiting for something unexpected to emerge. The result: thick, shaggy rugs that exist in the space between comfort and chaos — “patterns of uncontrolled behavior,” as he calls them. His rugs transform organic water lines, marks, points, and geometric forms into imprecise matrices, challenging the usual rigidity of grids. Like his animals, they bleed beyond their intended borders. It’s a perfect fit for cc-tapis, which since its founding in 2011 has quietly reshaped contemporary rugmaking through collaborations with Faye Toogood, Formafantasma, Philippe Malouin, and Patricia Urquiola, to name but a few. Van Mierlo’s latest addition to the cc-tapis family both structures and softens the domestic worlds it inhabits, existing in a place between order and instinct, nostalgia and modernity. Grandmotherly, but not delicate. Traditional, but untamed.