Follow the thread.

More than half a century after Cecilia Vicuña lived and worked in East London, Whitechapel Gallery brings the Chilean artist and poet back with ‘Living Threads’, her first major UK exhibition. Spanning six decades, the show brings together painting, textiles, performance and film, with poetry running through almost everything she makes.

London is more than just the setting for this show: Vicuña studied at the Slade School of Art from 1972 to 1974 and kept a studio in Stepney Green. Her work became more explicitly political during Salvador Allende’s presidency, an engagement that intensified in London, where she remained in self-exile following the military coup of 1973. A dedicated display looks at Artists for Democracy, the organisation she co-founded in London in 1974 with David Medalla, John Dugger and Guy Brett, bringing rarely seen archival material back to the city where the collective began.

One of the exhibition’s most striking works is ‘Quipu Menstrual’ (2006-2024), with lengths of vivid red and brown unspun wool suspended from the ceiling. Vicuña has returned to the quipu for more than 50 years, drawing on the ancient Andean system of knotted cords once used to record and communicate information. At the other end of the scale are Vicuña’s tiny ‘precarios’, fragile constructions made from found materials since the 1960s. The display includes surviving precarios from her London years alongside archival documentation of 400 lost works from that collection.

The exhibition ends with ‘Foraging Quipu’ (2025-2026), first realised at IMMA in Dublin and adapted for its London presentation using plant matter and lightweight debris gathered by local communities. After decades spent making work about what disappears and what survives, ‘Living Threads’ brings one important strand of that history right back to East London.