User:Laurarstockdale/sandbox

Alexandra Kehayoglou (b. 1981 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentinian textile artist. She is best known for her large-scale carpets which address topics of climate change.

Biography
Kehayoglou was born in 1981 in Buenos Aires, Argentina to a family of carpet-makers. Her grandparents immigrated from from Isparta (present-day Turkey) in the 1920s, bringing with them their practice of making Ottoman-style rugs. Her grandmother founded a carpet-making company, El Espartano, which is now one of South America's largest companies of its type. Kehayoglou went on to incorporate the family tradition of carpet-making into her own artistic practice.

She grew up in a house in Argentina surrounded by a garden, a forest, a farm, and a river, which influenced her artistic interest in nature and the Argentinian landscape.

Kehayoglou graduated from the IUNA Department of Art in Advertising and Photography at the University of Buenos Aires in 2008. Afterwards, she worked as a designer in her family's business, where she experimented with yarn waste in her spare time.

She currently lives and works in Buenos Aires, out of a workshop attached to the El Espartano factory.

Meaning and origins of her work
Her technique relies heavily on the hand-tufting system, a laborious type of textile weaving used in carpet-making. The subject matter links her with her family traditions, specifically her grandmother. She uses recycled scrap yarn from her family's factory to create her work.

Her subject matter is the Argentinean landscape that she calls home. She often travels to new locations to research and study the landscapes she depicts. Her work represents places which have been impacted by climate change or damaged by human activity. Her work has become known for its call for environmental preservation and awareness.

Works
For Paris Fashion Week in 2015, Dries van Noten ordered a tufted rug from Kehayoglou that covered the entire stage. The carpet consisted of four parts and totaled 144 square meters. It was completed by three 10-member teams in 16 days. The carpet is an abstraction of the Argentine landscape where she lives.

Her 2016 work No Longer Creek documents the Raggio Creek, a creek north of Buenos Aires whose banks have been damaged by human activity. Her work represents what the creek used to look like to reflect the greenery and landscape that has been lost. It calls the viewer to experience this environment that no longer exists and reconnect with lost nature.

In 2017 she completed Santa Cruz River, titled after the Santa Cruz Rive r in Argentina, which was the proposed site of two major hydroelectric dams.

Her 2018 series titled Prayer Rugs addresses the landscapes of the Parana Delta Wetlands, which has been damaged by deforestation, hunting, the introduction of foreign species of fauna, and both domestic and industrial pollution. Her work documents the "micro-narratives" of the surviving plants and wildlife in this region.