Skeins of raw undyed wool hanging in a white gallery room
Section 04 · Art

Art Diary — Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña at Whitechapel Gallery, London, 7 October 2026 to 14 February 2027.

· London

Cecilia Vicuña makes art out of almost nothing: a feather, a stick, a thread, a scrap found on a beach. Her exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in East London opened on 7 October and runs until 14 February 2027.

Vicuña was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1948. She is a poet as well as an artist, and she left Chile after the 1973 military coup. She has lived for many years in New York.

Two kinds of work define her. The precarios are tiny, fragile sculptures assembled from debris, made to last only a short while. The other is wool: long hanging lengths of raw, unspun fibre, drawing on the quipu, the knotted-cord recording system of the Andes. Loss, memory, water and the land come up again and again.

Her work asks you to slow down and look at small things. In a city as loud as London, that is the point.

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