Design New England - July/August 2011

BRAVE NEW RUGS • With wool as her medium, Rhode Island artist
Meg Little creates sublime painterly images for wall or floor
art

as deftly as a painter would use a brush on canvas, Meg Little wields her special tufting tool across a backcloth stretched floor to ceiling on a wooden frame.

THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF RUGS IN THIS world. The first is simply a floor covering — practical, utilitarian, low-key. The second nourishes the soul. Rhode Island artist Meg Little makes the latter — handmade one-of-a-kind wool creations that have more in common with contemporary painting than traditional rug making. A happy collision of riotous colors, bold shapes, and emphatic patterns laid out in large gestural swaths, her rugs hang commandingly on museum walls (she was featured in a show at the Newport Art Museum earlier this year) but are never too precious to settle comfortably under a beloved easy chair.

Created in her home studio, a converted barn in
Middletown, Rhode Island, Little’s rugs are influenced by
design originating in Africa, Australia, and Central America.
She adores South African painted houses, Yoruba beads,
Australian aboriginal paintings. For the large-scale rugs cre-
ated for her Newport exhibit, she looked to the work of the
African-American quilt makers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama.