Art

Craigie Horsfield
Until Feb 29
This event has finished
Frith Street, 17-18 Golden Square, W1F 9JJ
Rating:
'Zoo, Oxford. January 1990', tapestry, 2008
By Francis Gooding

Posted: Fri Feb 15
Under the right unusual circumstances, the very new and the very old can appear strangely similar, as though an essential quality, obscured by the intervening years, is illuminated within them. Newborn babies look like their grandparents; the ubiquity of email oddly mirrors the early postal system, with its multiple daily collections and deliveries. Something like this happens in Craigie Horsfield’s extraordinary photographs that have been rendered as huge tapestries. As the intricacy of the weaver’s craft absorbs all the qualities of photography, the new is telescoped into the old. The stitching quietly mimics the visual texture of the more modern medium, and from a distance the perfection of the effect is striking; go closer, and the images dissolve into thread-work that recalls the shattered grain of pixels in a digital close-up.

Massive, heavy and soft, these works have enormous gravity of presence. The manner of their creation – its painstaking nature so at odds with the instantaneous nature of the photograph – makes them appear somehow slowed, as though object and image have coalesced out of the dark in very long, fabric exposures. Nowhere is this strangeness more apparent than in the two great rhinos of ‘Zoo’, whose huge bulk comes forward in the shimmer of silver threads only to recede again into the darkness and straw of their captivity, reproaching us with the silent and infinite sadness of caged animals.