Craigie Horsfield
Although Craigie Horsfield has been working as an artist since the late 1960’s, he began exhibiting his photographs only two years ago.
This was a conscious decision based on the prevailing artistic climate which, he felt, had widened sufficiently to allow the space for other languages.
Horsfield lived and worked in central and eastern Europe and was in Germany in the late 1960s. The dissolution of idealism and resolve that followed seemed to him complete, and was inevitably reflected in the visual language of the day. In his view, the current fragmentation of the social and political fabric, the re-shaping of Europe and the world in which we live, carries with it implications for the social role of art. What will emerge from this turmoil is uncertain – Horsfield believes that art must act both critically and to sustain human solidarity. It is with this perception that he began to exhibit.
Horsfield fashions a vernacular that lies between heroism and romantic pessimism, a language that immediately engages our empathy, but in which wider issues can be read. His photographs – portraits, street scenes, still lives – both celebrate a point of contact and underscore our separateness, each from each. They are proof of resilience against a larger, indifferent world yet evidence our own, small isolations.
Horsfield creates images that provoke a shock of recognition. The images seem familiar, not because we recognise them as literally known, but because they worry at our most compassionate core. They express recognisable elementals – memory and desire, mortality and estrangement.
In his exceptional work, Craigie Horsfield combines intensity of being with what can be told, what remains, of emotion.