It takes any textile weaver a very long time to create a beautiful carpet by hand. So can you imagine if after all that hard work, the piece was destroyed and all that remained of it were the pictures taken while it existed? To some, this may sound like a nightmare, but for artist Danielle van Ark, this is an essential aspect of her artwork. She creates unique sand carpets that are as beautiful as they are ephemeral.

When you look at a work of art by Antonio Santin, you may think at first that you are looking at an intricate hand-woven rug. However, Santin is not a rug-maker but a painter. For each of his oil paintings of rugs, he uses thousands of brushstrokes to accurately recreate every detail of the original’s fabric and patterns. It is not the detailed painting of the rugs themselves that make Santin’s paintings so arresting yet so unsettling, though. It is what appears to lie beneath.