The show takes as its starting point the poem Yellow Stars and Ice by Susan Stewart, which illustrates the distance between two people through its own haunting and evocative language. The theme of distance and how it might be crossed is a reoccurring theme in Christabel’s work — the distance from the start of the warp to the end, from one side of the loom to the other, and how best to navigate the barriers that her hearing loss has imposed between her and the world around her.
In illustrating or exploring this distance, Christabel examines the limitations of language, what can be spoken and what can be heard, what can be recorded and what can be remembered. Her tapestries delve into the distant past, into the strange iconography of Anglo Saxon churches, the faded vellum of illuminated manuscripts and the ‘cloud of unknowing’ expressed through Medieval mysticism. The textiles themselves are woven and unwoven, grouped together from fragments and scraps, loose ends trailing.
The ‘unimagined animal’ of the title refers both to the strange creatures that populate her new tapestries, and to this sense of creation and un-creation, of something real and not-real, both present and absent.
Christabel Balfour is an artist and tapestry weaver based in East London. She studied Fine Art at Camberwell College of Art and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, graduating in 2013. She set up her eponymous studio in practice in 2015, and since then her work has spanned the domains of craft, functional design and fine art.
