Craigie Horsfield

Here Horsfield has uncovered the potentiality of a technique which is more often associated with decorative or applied art and used it to create intricate works which continue to explore themes of relation, slow time and the present.

The tapestries were begun as a narrative device – the literal weaving together of strands that take on meaning in their relation. They parallel the formal structure of the rest of the artist’s practice – long-form films, sound works and the social projects, which bind together complex and interwoven narrative lines. In the tapestries, the sense of their fabric as the material of representation concerns the interplay between the substance of the things depicted and of their being depicted – at once a metaphorical and actual interweaving. In tapestry each thread is equally significant to the unity of the image, the dense and complex tying together takes on a meaning which is formed by all the threads. Unlike a photographic surface, that of the tapestry is densely present and its rhetoric is not first of all concerned with the evanescence of light, but with the physical surface – the skin of things.

The photographic images on which these works are based were made more than 30 years ago and now. They return to the process described by Horsfield since the 1960s of ‘slow time’, of memory and present apprehension, involving affection and loss, shadow and light. Two rhinoceros, separated; a street and a couple lost; the tree at the end of the world; a cloud.

Although large, even monumental, these works speak of small intimacies, of the everyday and the present suffused with past longing – of hope, recognition and beauty.