In a thread of air

Chapter is proud to present Imogen Stidworthy’s first solo exhibition in the UK for over a decade. In a thread of air brings together a new installation, co-commissioned by Chapter and Matt’s Gallery, London, with three related installations and a short film.

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, she explores how communication shapes our ways of sense-making and relationship with self and others.

In these works we encounter the exchanges and flows of communication between autistic people who have no practice of speaking. We engage with people who speak from altered states, in spaces of transition between one reality and another, shaped by sudden, decisive 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.  

In a thread of air invites us to listen to others in a wider sense, through spoken words and non-verbal sounds, bodily gestures, movement, vibration, rhythm, currents of feeling and atmospheres. In Stidworthy's sculptural installations voicing becomes a place we can enter, where difference is embodied in multiple registers of communication. They invite us to dwell in a space between languages, to attune to and grow with unfamiliar forms of voicing, with others and in ourselves. 

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About the artist

Imogen Stidworthy is an artist based in Liverpool.

Her work has been exhibited in major exhibitions including The Myth of Normal at Hannover Kunstverein and Salzburger Kunstverein (2024); Survival Kit 11, LCCA, Riga (2020), Bergen Assembly (2019, 2013), Suzhou Biennial (2016), British Art Show 8 (2016–17), Sao Paulo Biennial (2014), Busan Biennial (2012), and Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany (2007).

She has presented solo exhibitions at Gallery Akinci, Amsterdam (2025, 2013, 2009, 2005); Museum Dr Guislain, Gent, Belgium (2022); Netwerk, Aalst, Belgium (2019); Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany (2018); Imperial War Museum, London (2015); and Matt's Gallery, London (2011, 2003).