Artists employing textiles, fibers and yarns in their works build soft worlds, weaving with their materials a wide range of stories. The best ones tell these stories through intricate immersive installations that create eerie environments with a dream-like quality about them.
Internationally acclaimed Chiharu Shiota, for example, is known for her ingeniously woven and impressively complex large-scale immersive thread art installations and multi-layered systems inspired by a variety of experiences, some of them very personal.
Born in Osaka, Shiota lives and works in Berlin, Germany, since the mid-1990s. She received recognition in her own country in 2001 with her work "Memories of Skin", an installation consisting in seven-metre high dirt-smeared dresses hovering over a pool of water, exhibited at the Yokohama International Triennale of contemporary art.
Shiota also represented Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 with the installation "The Key in the Hand", a series of boat carcasses trapped in a web of blood-red thread from which thousands of keys were suspended.
ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark is currently celebrating the Japanese artist with a solo exhibition entitled "Invisible Line" (until 16th April 2023). The event presents a series of installations that immerse visitors in Shiota's world. Rebecca Matthews, director at ARoS, defines it "an exhibition of intensity, powerfully personal, uncompromising, compelling and encompassing the universal through the particular.
Shiota often gets inspired by personal experiences or emotions that she weaves into her materials to explore universal concerns such as memory, life, impermanence, loss, death, pain, but also joy, exuberance, relationships and the mysterious interconnections of life. In quite a few cases, ordinary objects such as keys or sheets of paper are suspended in her labyrinthine structures of threads that occupy entire rooms.
The effect when you enter the beautiful "Last Hope", a meandering installation that develops from the skeleton of a piano (a recurrent symbol in the artist's works, a reference to seeing a jet black burnt piano still smoking in the snow after a a fire in a neighbour's house when she was a young girl) surrounded by white threads forming lines in the air. Music sheets are trapped in this ghostly mesh that looks like a web woven by a gigantic spider.
The complex environment made by miles of white filaments creates a sense of wonderment and mystery, almost as if you were walking through a tempest or a sandstorm that, frozen in time by a mysterious magic force, has left suspended in the air random objects hinting at invisible human presences.
It is confusing, scary (will a giant spider actually surprise you in one of these caves and attack you?), but also beautiful as you feel cocooned by the soft alcoves created by the threads.
For Shiota, threads symbolise links between states of mind, but they are also metaphors for life and death. The latter is not considered by the artist as an ending, but as a new beginning.
Compared to this spiderweb-like environment, "Light in the Darkness" is a minimal installation: it features a steel-framed hospital bed draped in Christmas lights surrounded by intravenous drip bags and chemotherapy paraphernalia and it is a reference to the pain the artist went through when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, a day after she was presented with plans for an ambitious solo exhibition spanning her 30-year artistic career.
The exhibition in Denmark also features "Out of My Body", a fragmented piece made with laser cut red-dyed leather; the abstract geometries of "Thread of Fate", a sculpture resulting from six large metal circles interlocked one with the other and covered in red threads, and "Internal Line".
The latter features three long dresses in bright tomato red and dark sunset orange suspended from the ceiling among a curtain of threads forming a dense screen that hides them (the way they hang is vaguely reminiscent of displays of Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara's innovative A-POC concept knitwear in fashion exhibitions), but also connects them with the visitors admiring the work.
"Shiota's works explore the life force which stretches between people, events and experience," explains indeed Matthews. "There is tension everywhere in her work. As well as a calm centre."
Image credits for this post
Installation photos of Chiharu Shiota, "Invisible Line", ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 2022-2023, photographs by Anders Sune Berg.
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