To visit London’s Cecilia Brunson Projects this summer is to experience a beguiling departure from everyday life; a tonic for the shallowness of the present. Making your way past the cafes of Bermondsey Street and slipping through an unassuming gateway, the commanding aspect of Royal Oak Yard gives the effect of walking through a de Chirico painting—towering buildings, long shadows, stillness—you then turn a corner and are confronted by humane, thought-provoking artworks in a soothing, beautifully-lit space. It is here that artist Eliza Kentridge has her exhibition, “Tethering;” it is here that her expansive embroidered installation fills the wallspace, revealing to the viewer a nonlinear narrative that feels at once intimate and engagingly universal. The wall speaks: it tells the story of lives measured out not, as T. S. Eliot wrote, in coffee spoons, but instead in minute acts of love and of care.

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The installation, though materially as delicate as gossamer, is heavy with meaning and striking in its power to spark your imagination. Quietly engrossing, the untitled artwork recalled for me the magic of seeing sixteenth-century tapestries up close. In each case you stand before the work, silent and reverential as it draws you in—at once in the exhibition space and far away in a state of reverie, perhaps communing with a long-lost relative or friend. The work is, by turns, serious and playful. It contains symbols both figurative and abstract. “It reminds me of the cave paintings of South Africa,” I heard a woman say,........

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