The myth-maker

Kiki Smith’s huge, new-agey tapestry is a typically personal layer cake of art history, myth, female identity and nature. The split between the underworld, earth and heavens recalls the cosmology of the Celts, Native and Central Americans. Its floating nude might be a sprite, a spirit or a goddess.

Celestial bodies

In recent years, Smith has moved away from the physical. In the 1980s her feminist sculptures explored flesh and bone, mining her Catholic upbringing and responding to the Aids crisis. Today, her work has taken a more celestial as well as a nature-loving turn, full of animals and stars.

Silver screen

Sky is partly inspired by an art historical odd couple: 1920s Hollywood and the Middle Ages, eras linked for Smith by their love of pageantry and spectacle. Like movie stars, the tapestries that once cloaked walls were there to dazzle – Sky’s glow specifically references the gleaming lights of RKO Pictures.

Looming large

This, though, is a 21st-century tapestry. Based on collaged drawings that Smith reworks over many months, her tapestries are created on a computerised Jacquard loom.

Part of Entangled: Threads & Making, Turner Contemporary, Margate, to Sunday 7 May