Barbara Christol envisions creation as a labyrinth, where the artist moves forward at the crossroads through trial and error, chance, and repetition—while holding onto a guiding thread. For her, art is, above all, a game. And she plays it using variable-geometry practices. Initially oscillating between the three-dimensional staging of a recurring object and photography, her taste for play and spatial composition quickly evolved into a reflection on artistic creation conceived as a rhizome, where the artist operates through “displacements”—the central theme of her research.

Over the years, Barbara Christol’s work has taken on a distinctive form through the development of a nomadic visual practice, adaptable to the conditions of her solo travels around the world. She creates ephemeral weaving series using balls of yarn—a cherished material she has worked with for over 25 years—which she installs in nature, institutional spaces, and private settings. In her paintings and drawings, the thread is always present—either physically or through the omnipresent use of line—and through playful shifts in scale, she moves between figuration and abstraction.

Deeply committed to the artisanal dimension of her artistic practice, she primarily uses classical and traditional techniques and materials, which she reuses, blends, and reinterprets with more contemporary tools and methods. Somewhere between Ariadne and Penelope, Barbara Christol tirelessly weaves and unweaves her work.