The museum piece: The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, also known as The Unicorn in Captivity, from the Unicorn Tapestries. Woven 1495–1505 in wool, silk, silver and gilt thread. Cartoon made in Paris, woven in the Southern Netherlands. The Met Cloisters, 37.80.6. A white unicorn sits collared inside a low circular fence, tethered to a pomegranate tree. The Met notes the red marks on his flank aren't blood but juice from the bursting pomegranates above, a medieval symbol of fertility and marriage. His chain is loose and the fence is low enough to leap. He stays anyway. Woven into the field, in several places, are the letters A and E. Nobody has ever explained what they mean. Rewoven. I rewove it as a Tunisian mergoum kilim. The composition is untouched: same pose, same collar, same slack chain, same low fence, same pomegranate tree, same juice on the flank. Pomegranate means fertility and marriage in Tunisian wedding custom too, so that symbol needed no translation. What changes is the language everything else is written in. The millefleurs field becomes Amazigh geometry — diamonds, combs, the protective eye, eight-pointed stars — the motifs North African women used for centuries to record lineage and protection without writing. And where the original hides its unexplained A and E, I wove Tifinagh instead. The two traditions were never separate. In 1500 Tunis was a Mediterranean port and North African carpets were already arriving in Northern European houses, draped over tables in the paintings of that exact decade. This isn't a fusion I invented. It's a trade route the original was already part of. Process: material before image. I pulled North African tapestry-weave textiles from The Met's own Open Access archive — the same weave structure as the unicorn tapestry, a thousand years older — and bought three margoums in Tunis to study the geometry. Wool swatches were generated first and fed back as texture references so the material drove the picture instead of decorating it. Ground colour was tested as a single variable. Broken details were repaired by targeted inpaint rather than re-rolling. Every rejection is still on the canvas with the reason written beside it. European tapestry meant courts and named patrons. Maghrebi weaving is domestic, anonymous, undervalued. The unicorn's story was always about something kept happily inside a fence. Retelling it in wool hands that story to the women who were kept beside the same fence, in an alphabet that was always theirs. Shown unfinished on the loom, because the point isn't that it was remade. It's that someone is still remaking it

Met link: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/467642

How long did this take ?