Picture someone on a London pavement, crouched over a dry seed head, turning it in their fingers and deciding it deserves a place in a gallery. Now picture many others doing the same with twigs, bits of root and the lightest scraps of debris they can find. That open call is how Foraging Quipu came together, and it is the final work visitors meet in Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads at Whitechapel Gallery.
Cecilia Vicuña, Foraging Quipi. Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Menstrual 1 (unknotted) , 2006 / 2024. Site-specific installation with unspun wool. Photo: Isabella Matheus.
Vicuña, born in Santiago in 1948, is a poet, painter and activist whose sculptures grew out of thread. Her subject is the quipu, the Andean system of knotted, coloured cords that pre-Hispanic civilisations used to record knowledge and pass on stories without an alphabet. She has been making her own versions for more than fifty years, and the exhibition opens with one: Quipu Menstrual, a dense fall of unspun wool in reds and browns hanging from the ceiling. It grew from a 2006 performance on Chile’s El Plomo Glacier, where she laid red wool at the foot of the ice to link menstrual blood with melting glacier, both cyclical and both under siege.
Cecilia Vicuña, Ser eléctrico (precarios), 2018. Nails, plastic, clay, 20.3 x 16 x 7 cm © 2026 Cecilia Vicuña/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London. Photo: Studio Kukla
The story starts in London, where Vicuña studied at the Slade from 1972 to 1974, kept a studio in Stepney Green and stayed on in self-exile after the 1973 military coup against Salvador Allende. Here she made precarios, small sculptures of hand-bound booklets, newspaper, fabric and found scraps, a form she first laid on beaches for the tide to take away. Only one London set survives, Precarios: A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance, and it is shown alongside records of the 400 works that were lost. Anyone who has watched a favourite cloth wear thin will understand how much meaning a fragile thing can carry.
Cecilia Vicuña, Foraging Quipi. Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Language gets unpicked and rewoven too. Her Palabrarmas fuse palabras (words) and armas (weapons), splitting language apart to find new meanings, and the 28 AMAzone works of 1978 combine drawing, collage and textile. In Bogotá she filmed What is Poetry to You?, stopping people from children to scientists to ask each the same question. Back in London she co-founded Artists for Democracy in 1974 with David Medalla, John Dugger and Guy Brett, and a dedicated display shows documents and photographs never seen before.
Cecilia Vicuña, Foraging Quipi. Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Which brings us back to the pavement foragers. Foraging Quipu was first made at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2025, and the London version suspends locally gathered plant matter, fungi, fragments of wood and plastics into one hanging cord. Seeds and roots sit beside plastic debris, a fair portrait of the places we actually live.
. . .
Further Information:
Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads runs alongside Cecilia Vicuña: Foraging Quipi until 14 February 2027 at Whitechapel Gallery, London, and is ticketed.
. . .
Image Credits:
Lead: Installation view, ‘Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads’. Photo © Rob Harris.
All further images as credited in captions.