Solway's Last Light

There is a particular hour just before dusk when colour stops behaving and starts insisting burnt orange holding its ground against a sky gone the colour of stone. Here, that hour holds still. An arch in burnt terracotta meets a pale grey sphere, sliced by a column of navy pinstripe, as if a doorway and a moon had agreed to share the same wall. Below, a row of narrow teeth runs the width of the room, a horizon, or a memory of one. Wool, hand-knotted by the weavers of Jodhpur, carries the colour matte until it reaches the arch, where a quieter sheen takes over, brightened by hand. Set against a Georgian cornice, or beneath a concrete ceiling stripped of ornament, its geometry holds the room's attention without asking for it. In a Hampstead study, lamplight catching the arch at evening, the piece keeps its own time.