Amazing Hand Hooked Wool Rugs of Sleeping Dogs

Textiles artist Emily O’Leary creates amazingly realistic hand-hooked rugs that are shaped like sleeping dogs, appearing much in the way that animal skin rugs have historically decorated floors, but in a far more human manner.

Old school animal skin rugs reduce the ferocious to passive novelty. Lions, tigers, and bears become literal doormats. My hooked rugs are shaped like dogs and are installed on the floor so that they are viewed from above.

O’Leary acknowledges that these rugs can be a bit disconcerting because of this comparison and particularly due to her rustic style.

Instead of taking flesh and taming it, my dog rugs take the homespun technique of rug hooking and use it to create likenesses that, while tender and vulnerable, are also a little unnerving. The rug dogs are sleeping, but, because of their resemblance to animal skin rugs, they could also appear to be dead.  

O’Leary also shares how she makes these rugs.

Rugs are hooked by pulling loops of fabric strips or yarn through the holes of a base fabric with a coarse open weave, like burlap, or linen, or rug warp. The loops are pulled through the fabric with a squat-handled hook whose business end is shaped similarly to a crochet hook. 

via Colossal