Christopher Farr

Educated at the Slade School in England and trained in textiles in villages in Peru and Turkey, Christopher Farr has made his mark as one of today’s preeminent rug designers. As a young abstract painter in 1975, he won a Boise Traveling Fellowship to Peru. It was this trip that soon sealed the direction of his artistic life, because there Farr encountered pre-Columbian textiles for the first time and was seized by the magnetism and utility of the 3,000 year old work. He began to search for ways to marry his love of abstraction to the ancient craft of textile art and spent months designing and making rugs in a village in Western Turkey. With time, his work fused the venerable techniques of hand dying and hand looming with a modernist concern for colour and form. The result is abstract wool canvases for the floor.