“My creations with thread are reflections of my own feelings. A thread can be a cut, a knot or a loop, or can be loose or sometimes tangled. A thread to me is an analogy for feelings or human relationships. When using it, I do not know how to lie. If I weave something and it turns out to be ugly, twisted, or knotted, then such must have been my feelings when I was working.” — Chiharu Shiota
Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s intricate, immersive thread installations explore the connections between past and present, object and memory. Unfulfilled by her training as a painter, she began working with woven yarn after a strange dream during her year studying in Australia: ‘I was part of a three-dimensional painting and couldn’t breathe, because I was covered in paint. [...] After that I knew I had to create art using my body.’ [1] Feeling restless upon her return to Germany, one day she began spinning black wool around herself, using it to create spaces with different meanings. Black wool became a way to reconstruct the night sky or the cosmos, whilst red wool visualised human connections and relationships.
Shiota’s Trauma/Alltag series incorporates found everyday objects such as clothing, shoes or dolls. Containers for profound memories, joyful and painful, these banal but intensely personal items symbolise the poetics of everyday life:
I can see people through these objects. I can recognise who they are or who they were through the objects they have used or the books they have read. People move, travel, change, but they leave something on everything they touch and use: clothes, shoes, furniture, houses, even after they have gone away. [2]
[1] Martin Orth, ‘“I had a dream”: How Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is enchanting the art world’, deutschland.de, 4 February 2019, online
[2] Brittney, ‘Stitching the sublime: Chiharu Shiota’s threads of time – interview’, Art Radar Journal, 24 July 2015, online
Installation view of Seven Dresses, Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Germany, 2015
Photograph by Sunhi Mang
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner
Exhibited
Osaka, The National Museum of Art, Chiharu Shiota: Breath of the Spirit, 1 July - 15 September 2008, p. 45 (illustrated)