I HOLD YOU IN DEVOTION - Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach, FL, USA: SOLO

I hold you in devotion, Makiko Harris

words by Millie Walton

The press of flesh behind aluminium stockings. Lockets bearing thick plaits of hair. Giant sewing needles suspended by chains. This is the world of American Japanese artist Makiko Harris, whose practice explores the performance of identity, embodiment, and ideas of belonging. I hold you in devotion, her solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach, marks the expansion of her distinct visual language through ambitious large-scale sculptures, bold new paintings and a collaborative performance piece. Together these works unsettle the gallery space, transforming it into a site of ritual, tension and care.

While studying for her MA at the Royal College of Art in London, Harris inherited her Japanese grandmother's sewing kit containing a variety of needles which had been used not only to make clothes but as a form of creative self-expression. Fascinated by the intimacy and tactility of these tools as well as their relationship to the feminist history of textile arts, Harris began to reimagine the needles at a larger-than-life scale. In this exhibition, they have further evolved into a set of five four-metre-long sculptures hung from the ceiling, roughly at the height of the viewer's stomach. Here, they take on a more direct and confrontational relationship to the body: we are able to walk between the needles, to stand at their pointed tips. They occupy a curious space in which they are alternately objects of precarity, violence and, at the same time, reparation.

Drawing further on ideas of embodiment and ritual, the sculptures will be activated by a live performance at the exhibition opening, later screened on continuous loop. The work features dancers performing original choreography to a score by Carlos Basilisco, custom rope sculptures by couture designer Deborah Milner, and Harris herself as both performer and musician. The live performance functions as an act of claiming space, while the video folds it back into the exhibition, no longer an added element, but embedded in both the work's making and the viewer's encounter.

Also shown here for the first time are a series of oversized lockets that expand the artist's interest in the ways in which we preserve, honour and embody memory. Each locket is displayed with its doors open, connected by a chain and padlock as if it has been prised open to reveal something private and bodily. On one side, it houses a snake-like plait of real human hair and on the other engraved stone, a reference to tombstones and the memories that outlast us.

This contrast between industrial materials, the body and nature runs throughout Harris' work, and is best articulated here in a series of small-scale photographic works which depict the artist lying on the grass next to Mega Nail in Lady Alleyn Red, her large fingernail sculpture before it was installed in the Lovington Sculpture Meadow at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. Presented as a layered double image in which we only glimpse the artist's naked body as if peering through a peephole, we are once again placed in the uncomfortable position of the voyeur, while the nail itself becomes like a shield or a casket, something to hold or protect the body.

A continuation of Harris' Stockings series similarly examines the tensions between vulnerability and strength, sensuality and violence, exposure and censorship. These works feature abstracted, fleshy body parts bulging suggestively against what appears from a distance to be fishnet tights but on closer inspection, the netting reveals itself to be a kind of rigid armour, made of stainless steel. While Harris previously worked from self-portrait photographs to create her compositions, these new works involve collaboration with a close friend, their limbs appearing tangled and overlapping, further skewing our perspective while also offering a more expansive view of the intimacy of female friendship. Here, the fishnet stockings are not just a symbol of self-empowerment, but one of rebellion in which the sensuality of the body is consciously reclaimed and deployed, a form of agency rather than offering.

In Harris's hands, making and devotion become indistinguishable: each work a keepsake, each keepsake an act of intimacy, resistance, and care.