Like The Corners
Of My Mind...
Japanese installation artist, Chiharu Shiota is interested in memories, and the many objects and places that bear significant memories for us. The Japanese-born, Berlin-based artist recently presented her first Australian solo exhibition in Melbourne last year at Anna Schwartz Gallery as part of the broader Melbourne Festival.
Titled Absent Bodies, the installation was another of Shiota’s infamous tangled red webs – an explosive, wild and intricate flurry of blood-red string, fused with symbolic ornaments and objects.
Born to a family of factory workers, Shiota’s father believed her life should be behind the sewing machine. But rather than follow in strictly industrial footsteps, she instead turned to winding and unravelling wirey yarn through museums, galleries and even (impressively) entire buildings.
“My creations with thread are reflections of my own feelings,” the artist explains. “A thread can be a cut, knotted or looped, can be loose or sometimes tangled. A thread to me is an analogy for feelings and human relationships.” At the 2015 Venice Biennale, Shiharu filled the Japanese pavillion with her tangled mass, suspending 50,000 tiny keys from the ceiling, which were donated from people around the world . And in Absent Bodies, Shiota’s red web stretched from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, funneling toward the centre to reveal two empty chairs facing one another. Shiota plays with the concept of objects and subjects that are no longer present but have left behind traces of their being there.
Her spellbinding work is a poetic reminder that places, architecture, and all of our designed objects – insignificant or significant at face value – are imbued with memory, becoming significant of their own accord. It’s a powerful idea in the ideation of any design; how visitors, consumers, or passersby will perceive design both now and in the future.