Space Cossacks, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug by OLK Manufactory

OLK Manufactory is a Kyiv-based company that produces traditional and modern hand-woven rugs and tapestries. The company was founded by a Ukrainian artist and designer Oksana Levchenya. The artist has managed to create a new product by combining unique modern designs, folk ornaments and traditional crafting technique. OLK Manufactory produces four types of woven articles: tapestries for quasi-ethnography; reproductions of ancient Ukrainian flatweaves; kilims with implanted symbols of modern pop culture into folk patterns of the 16th – 18th centuries; rugs inspired by Suprematism, a modernist art movement founded by Kazimir Malevich at the beginning of the XX century. Manufacturing process Vertical kilims, produced in OLK Manufactory, are an area landmark in the craftsmanship of Ukrainian carpet-weaving. An extremely intricate traditional technique, manual weaving, ranging back to the 16th century, has been preserved in OLK’s manufacturing process. Each stage of production – design, yarn-dyeing, intertwining by hand and steaming of the ready-made kilim is realized directly in the workshop. This enables to oversee the entire process and pay attention to every detail. The key concerns of the company are ecological cleanliness of production and highly paid labor of masters since no machines are used during the kilim production process.