In November, White Cube in New York will present the most ambitious sculpture of Doris Salcedo's career: a full-sized house, nearly 30 feet high, woven entirely from human hair. The Colombian artist, 67, spent three years on the piece with dozens of assistants across three studios in Bogota, knotting strands into a mesh that grows darker toward the base. She has said the same work would have taken her two decades alone.

The scale is new for an artist who once made every sculpture by herself. At 31, Salcedo was diagnosed with Stargardt disease, a rare genetic condition that destroyed her central vision; today she is legally blind, with only peripheral sight. Her best-known work, the giant crack cut across Tate Modern's Turbine Hall floor in 2007, dates from after her sight began to fail. Giving up the privacy of improvising alone was a difficult adjustment, she says, but working with a team forced her to plan each piece in precise detail — and she now finds the collective result stronger.

House takes its theme from domicide, the deliberate destruction of homes. She points to Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and Sudan, where whole populations are being violently displaced. It follows Uprooted (2020-22), a nearly 1,000-foot-long home built from 804 dead trees about climate refugees, and Fragmentos (2018), her Bogota memorial floored with tiles made from firearms melted down from the FARC guerrilla group, created with 20 Colombian women who survived sexual violence in the conflict. Alongside House she shows Grains of Sorrow (2023-26), single hairs threaded through grains of rice stripped of their starch, formed around dented pots and bowls.

Hair has run through Salcedo's practice since the 1990s, when she threaded locks from a local salon through broken tables. For House she sourced hair online, checking certificates carefully given the violence in the human-hair trade. The labour is part of the meaning: her studios employ some 150 women from rural Colombia, and she frames the painstaking handwork as a rebuttal to histories of modern art that erase the Global South — insisting that beauty restores dignity to victims of violence, rather than decorating their suffering.