Like a dark obsession with arachnids, Japanese-born artist Chiharu Shiota wraps
objects from floor to ceiling in miles of black wool, as though clambering around in the skeins of our unconscious. In her
best-known installations she has weaved black yarn into hectic webs that
take over entire galleries and in which personal objects are found
cocooned. Shiota has ensnared everything from
the wedding dresses seen in her Walking in my Mind exhibition
at the Hayward gallery, to a grand piano and childhood toys. In one of
her sleeping performances, you might even find Shiota herself ensconced
beneath layers of mesh. Her
work, ambiguous and stunning, leaves you curious about the strangled
objects seemingly suspended in time and space.
Personal experience is central to Shiota's work. For a project
initially staged as Dialogue from DNA in 2004 in Poland and then
recreated in Germany and Japan, she invited people to donate footwear
with a memory attached – resulting in thousands of old shoes, many of
which had belonged to loved ones who had died. She attached each to a
taut red thread, a symbol of the path through life as well as the
imprint of journeys taken.
There's a similar push and pull between
closeness and separation in her sleeping performances, where women doze
on neatly arranged hospital beds beneath a canopy of black threads.
However intimate watching these people sleep might have felt, the artist
implies that we can never know what's going on behind their closed
eyes.
'The hinterlands between waking life and dream states' ... An installation in the "House of Imagination", Berlin (2008)
'She weaves black yarn into hectic webs' ... Chiharu Shiota's installation During Sleep (2010)
