About
Christabel Balfour is an artist and tapestry weaver, based in East London. Her work explores the complex connections between language, mythology and landscape, interlinked with the tactile qualities of weaving itself.
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 has worked across the domains of craft, interior design and fine art. Notable projects include her handwoven shutters for the architects Chan & Eayrs on the Beldi in Shoreditch, and her tapestry altar cloths for John Paulson’s renovation of St John at Hackney church.
Alongside her collaborations with architects and interior designers, she has developed a body of work that draws on both her faith background and her experience as a deaf artist. She often works in total silence, constructing her designs organically at the loom. Her tapestries reference the iconography of Anglo-Saxon churches, early illuminated manuscripts and medieval mysticism, as well as the colours and textures of the landscape this history springs from. Repeated motifs, such as the winding line and reaching hand, form part of a woven narrative that continues from one tapestry to the next. Yet her designs are also fragmentary and scattered, like pages lost to history, or a saying half-heard.
Selected exhibitions include: “Craft” By Residency, London, UK (2021) “Hand and Land” Make Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, UK (2020) “Makers & Tools”, Old Fire Station Oxford, UK (2019)
