Once encountered, Pipilotti Rist is not a name that is easily forgotten. The Swiss video artist – born Elisabeth Charlotte Rist – takes her name from Pippi Longstocking, heroine of Astrid Lindgren’s much-loved series of children’s books. It is a choice full of color and playfulness – two qualities that have been a constant in the 52-year-old’s career. It seems entirely in character that she named her son Himalaya. 

Today's lush and hypnotic sequence is taken from Worry Will Vanish, Rist’s new show at Hauser & Wirth in Savile Row, London. If right now you happen to be viewing it snuggled up in bed, then the artist would approve. Visitors to the gallery remove their shoes before entering and are encouraged to lie down to watch the installation: the medium is described in the small print as a “corner projection on two walls, sound, carpet, white duvets."

With her viewers tucked in at Hauser & Wirth’s slumber party, Rist layers on the intimacy with her wrap-around super-close-ups of human skin in all its spooky beauty. At times, too, she takes us inside the body, to a pulsating world of veins and capillaries, vessels and membranes. Meanwhile, the natural world outside is also put under the artist’s microscope of wonder, all to the accompaniment of musician Anders Guggisberg’s mesmerizing soundtrack.

Rist first studied video at the School of Design in Basel, a city known as much for the pharmaceutical industry as for art. It was here, in 1943, that her fellow Swiss, the scientist Albert Hofmann, first discovered and took LSD, describing his experience thus: “I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with an intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.” How closely that mirrors the beautiful world of the everyday that Rist has so sensually conjured up.

Tom Horan is Culture Editor-at-Large at NOWNESS.