Chapter presents In a thread of air, Imogen Stidworthy’s first major UK exhibition in over a decade

For over thirty years Stidworthy’s practice has engaged with different forms of voicing, reflecting on what it means to have a voice and what it means to listen. Her works develop through spending time with people who embody different ways of being. In the sonorous, spatialised forms of her installations and films, difference is embodied in multiple registers of communication. These works invite us to dwell in spaces between languages and attune to unfamiliar forms of voicing with others and in ourselves.

In a thread of air asks us to listen to others through spoken words and non-verbal sounds, gestures, movement, vibration, rhythm, currents of feeling and atmospheres. The exhibition engages with the frequencies of communication in distinct contexts including a hospital, a rehabilitation clinic, group therapy and an alternative community for non-speaking children – spaces where ways of being are suspended and reconfigured. Through a series of intimate and nuanced portraits composed of spoken word, utterances and spatial relationships, we witness lives in flux, and new forms of sense-making emerge. 

In Balayer - A Map of Sweeping (2014-18) we encounter exchanges and flows of communication between autistic people who have no practice of speaking. This small community embodies the living traces of the experimental ‘network’ (réseau) and visionary project established by French educationalist, writer and film-maker Fernand Deligny (1913-1996), in Monoblet (Cevennes, France). Here, adults and non-speaking autistic children lived with adults, ‘close presences’, outside institutional or therapeutic frameworks. The installation captures glimpses of daily life in the contemporary situation, including two of the now-adult children, and their engagement in a mark-making activity. In the absence of verbal communication it encourages you to shift between different sensory and cognitive registers. The ambisonic sound soundtrack challenges listening habits and creates a spatialised polyphony of cadences, sounds and movements.  

The exhibition engages with people who speak in spaces of transition between realities shaped by sudden changes in body or mind. We meet them in delirium, in psychosis, or on the slow, resistant path to rehabilitation after a major health incident. 

If I Knew What Giving Up Looks Like (2025) moves between coma and consciousness. It draws on dialogues with staff and patients and a specially devised mind-body-voice practice, initiated with patients by the artist, at Lippoldsberg Rehabilitation Clinic (Germany) between 2019 and 2021. In the installation we witness life in flux amid adaptation to radically changed physical and mental capacities, and physical and cognitive processes of rehabilitation. 

STILL LIFE BABEL (2025) carries three voices and projected images of tiny straw sculptures, sewn with medical sutures, projected over a pool of petroleum oil. Each voice in the installation embodies being between psychic states and the realities they produce. Structures of language and straw hold together in fragile ways. Values are inverted. Meanings drift or flip from familiar reference points and voices are paths into the world and world making.

Stidworthy’s new installation, In a thread of air (2026) co-commissioned by Chapter and Matt’s Gallery, London, focuses on a group practice guided by Swedish therapist Iris Johansson. Her approach is informed by her sensory and social perception, as an autistic person who was non-speaking until the age of 12. The installation captures glimpses and sounds of the therapeutic process, and engages with tangible and intangible dimensions of “the real work” that is happening in and between bodies. These registers of communication and Johansson’s practice shaped the staging and filmic language of scenes recorded over one three-day session of Primary Thinking Work, in 2025. In the installation, they are evoked by the interplay of voices, bodies and projected images playing across opaque and transparent screens.  

Also presented in the exhibition is Iris [A Fragment] (2018), which initiated Stidworthy’s long-term dialogue with Iris Johansson. The work was filmed in Dahab, Egypt and Fagersta, Sweden, where Johansson lives and works, between 2017 and 2018. 

“I am still autistic and part of me will always be non-verbal.” Through the lens of Johansson’s autistic perception, the work asks how different ways of being affect our perception of core aspects of experience – of our bodies, physical space, social relationship, sense-making and sense of self.