Gaon Naksha

A pictorial village Gaon Naksha rug, knotted by hand with hand-carded, hand-spun, vegetable-dyed wool, woven by master weavers in the Zamling Tibetan weaving project in Nepal.

Gaon Naksha, meaning “village-life design,” was a distinctive rug type within the Tibetan Rug Weaving Project, begun in Nepal in the early 1990s, in which weavers composed their designs directly on the loom rather than following fixed patterns. These one-of-a-kind rugs often drew on memories and scenes of village life, giving each piece an unusually personal and spontaneous folk-art character. The rugs were made with Tibetan wool from sheep raised on the high-elevation pastures of the Tibetan Plateau. The project grew from the Tibetan refugee weaving tradition established in Nepal after 1959 and helped support educational and health programs for Tibetan communities. These Gaon Naksha rugs are no longer in production, making the remaining pieces scarce examples of a remarkable chapter in Tibetan-Nepalese weaving.