Floor_Story x Kitty Joseph Optick Rug Collection

The Water Optik Rug, on VOGUE LIVING AUSTRALIA's December 2022 Cover

'Coming from a fashion background, and with a textiles training, I wanted to explore colour in space in the same way I approach my clothing designs: dressing and uplifting our daily experience with therapeutic colour and texture.

When researching for my first interiors project, I spent time laying out vast lengths and bolts of my printed and pleated fabrics, imagining them adorning floors and walls. There is a different emotion you get from textiles laid out flat. They become like pools of colour that immerse your field of vision, that shake up and shift your mood, changing your perspective in the way that putting on a record after a hard day might. 

Being able to freely translate the way I use and see colour on my clothing into an interior setting felt important , so when I came across Floor Story and saw how they worked with creatives in diverse fields, it felt like a dream match.

The Optick Collection is my second with Floor Story. After the Chroma Rug collection, a range of rugs consisting of 38 colours per palette, I really wanted to strip back the colours and work with just two for each design. With bicolour palettes such as Sun, Water, Geranium and Sky, I wanted to evoke powerful colour experiences from the outdoors and bring them indoors. 

 I designed  the collection to explore our optical colour experiences in nature. Our perception of rippling water, or of a dusk blue sky dusted with pink clouds unfolds and evolves in real time. I wanted to recreate that movement and feeling of constant shifting by using the optical carving.  Marking out the rug designs to scale on the floor of my studio with masking tape helped me to create the angles of the lines that define the subtly shifting geometry of the rugs.   As you move around these carved rugs, or turn them in a space, the colours and proportions shift, simulating that mesmeric movement.'

Kitty Joseph