MAKIKO HARRIS PRESENTS I HOLD YOU IN DEVOTION

Following a breakthrough year that saw her selected for New Contemporaries 2026 (one of the UK’s most established annual exhibitions showcasing emerging and early-career artists), present work across Europe and feature in a Nikon short documentary exploring her practice, Japanese-American artist Makiko Harris returns this autumn with her most ambitious exhibition to date.

Opening on 30th October 2026 at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery’s West Palm Beach space, I Hold You in Devotion brings together monumental new sculptures, paintings, photography and live performance to explore devotion, memory and what the body continues to carry long after someone is gone. Featuring Harris’s largest sculptures to date and introducing photography into her practice for the first time, the exhibition marks a significant expansion of both scale and medium, building on ideas and materials that have defined her work in recent years.

Harris has developed a distinctive visual language that transforms everyday objects associated with femininity – sewing needles, fingernails and fishnet stockings – into monumental works that shift the relationship between the viewer’s own body and the object. Growing up between Japanese and American cultures, Harris has long been interested in how symbols and identities shift depending on context and perspective. Throughout her practice, the colour red has become a recurring way of exploring these ideas: in Japan, vermilion traditionally carries associations of luck, fertility and beauty, while historically in the West the same shade was associated with danger and aggression.

Music, performance and ideas of identity run throughout Harris’s work. Having played violin since the age of four, she often draws inspiration from inherited rituals and histories, alongside the ways people construct and express versions of themselves. Across sculpture, film and installation, Harris uses scale and materiality to create work that asks questions around agency, desire and the politics of the body.

Speaking on her work, Harris says:
“I’m interested in the emotional weight that everyday objects can carry, particularly those connected to femininity, domestic life and forms of labour that are often overlooked. I’m drawn to things that might seem small or ordinary but hold traces of care, memory and personal history. Making work is a way of understanding myself and making sense of the world around me; each piece becomes both a process of discovery and a way of communicating something that can be difficult to put into words.”

Harris first began exploring these ideas through Needle Dance, a body of work spanning sculpture, film and live performance that drew on the Japanese myth of the red thread of fate. Following exhibitions and performances across London, including at South London Gallery and art’otel Hoxton, I Hold You in Devotion expands that visual language into more personal territory. Where Needle Dance asked how far fate and ancestry shape a life, the new work turns toward devotion, grief and the traces people leave behind.

Integrating Performance
The exhibition opens on the evening of 30th October with a live performance created in collaboration with Ballet Florida, a West Palm Beach-based dance company. Presenting a further iteration of Needle Dance Live, a piece that has continued to evolve since its debut, the performance will feature original choreography performed by four dancers from the Ballet Florida company, a score by Carlos Basilisco and custom rope sculptures by couture designer Deborah Milner. Harris performs as both artist and musician, playing the original score live on violin.

The needle sculptures, suspended horizontally from the ceiling at the height of the viewer’s stomach, are conceived as objects in direct physical relationship to the body. Bringing trained dancers into that space activates a tension already present in the work, the body moving between potential threat and reparation. The performance will be filmed and screened on continuous loop throughout the month-long run, extending the collaboration beyond opening night for the full duration of the show.

New Work
At the heart of the exhibition are five needle sculptures, each measuring four metres in length, suspended horizontally from the ceiling at approximately the height of the viewer’s stomach. Where a needle in the hand is a tool directed by the body, here the relationship is reversed: the points are directed at the body as it moves through the space. The works build on material research that began with the inherited sewing kit of Harris’s Japanese grandmother, a collection of needles used as a form of creative expression by a woman who, as Harris has described, had very little choice over the shape of her own life. Fabricated in cast and hand-finished aluminium, they occupy space differently at this scale, allowing viewers to move between them and stand at their pointed tips in a relationship that simultaneously holds precarity, threat and care.

Shown for the first time is a series of oversized lockets, each displayed open and connected by chain and padlock as though prised apart. Drawing on the tradition of Victorian mourning jewellery, in which hair or portraits of the deceased were kept against the body, Harris takes this sentiment of carrying memory close and reimagines it through lockets recreated at an imposing scale. One side of each locket houses a snake-like plait of real human hair, while the other contains a delicate oil painting.

The exhibition also features the largest works from Harris’s ongoing Stockings series, paintings that use fishnet forms as both structure and subject. New compositions made in collaboration with a close friend depict limbs tangled and overlapping across the canvas, marking the first time Harris has worked with another person’s body alongside her own and opening the work onto ideas of female friendship and intimacy. Pressing against fishnet forms constructed from stainless steel, the figures appear caught between softness and constraint, continuing Harris’s interest in reimagining objects traditionally associated with femininity.

Completing the exhibition is a series of photographic works, a medium making its first appearance in Harris’s practice. Depicting the artist alongside her fingernail sculpture Mega Nail in Lady Alleyn Red prior to its installation at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, the works are presented as layered double images offering only partial glimpses of the artist’s body, as though through a peephole. They extend the exhibition’s interest in memory and devotion, exploring the desire to preserve a person, moment or feeling while recognising how incomplete acts of remembering can be.

Kristin Hjellegjerde, founder of Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, says, “Makiko is a force of creative and innovative fire. She can make the most brilliant ideas come to life with exceptional finishes. I am trying to find as many opportunities for her to shine as possible, so not only I but everyone gets to experience what she comes up with next – there is always a surprise.”