Imogen Stidworthy

Opening event: Saturday 21 March, 4 – 7pm

Exhibition continues: 22 March – 7 June 2026
Tuesday – Sunday, 12 – 5pm
Chapter
Market Road, Canton, Cardiff, CF5 1QE, Wales

In a thread of air is Imogen Stidworthy’s first solo exhibition in the UK for over a decade.

The exhibition brings together a new installation, co-commissioned by Chapter and Matt’s Gallery, with three related installations and a short film. The new installation will be shown at Matt's Gallery from September 2026.

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.

For Matt's Gallery Stidworthy is also currently developing Radical Audio Guides, a series of co-created responses to the new work that will form part of the exhibition in September. Radical Audio Guides a collaborative project involving organisations and neurodiverse and disabled creatives in Wandsworth. It is supported by Wandsworth Council as part of London Borough of Culture.

In a thread of air is supported by principal funder Colwinston Charitable Trust, Freelands Foundation, Arts Council England and Liverpool John Moores University.