ART-PRESENTATION: Chiharu Shiota-Me Somewhere Else

Chiharu Shiota is best known for creating room-filling, monumental, delicate and poetic environments. Central to the artist’s work are the themes of remembrance and oblivion, dreaming and sleeping, traces of the past and childhood, and dealing with anxieties. Chiharu Shiota in her installations often employs the use of everyday objects, within her work to explore the relationship between living and dying and to access memories found within these objects.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blain|Southern Gallery Archive

Chiharu Shiota in her solo exhibition “Me Somewhere Else” at Blain|Southern Gallery in London presents site-specific installations, sculpture and works on canvas. The titular installation “Me Somewhere Else” continues Shiota’s exploration of thread as a medium but here she utilises the material in a markedly different way, using her fingers to knot red yarn into a vast net. Suspended from the gallery ceiling, the net is a billowing mass which rises from a pair of bronze feet that rest on the floor below. Cast from the artist’s own feet, the solidity and permanence of the bronzes contrasts with the usually ephemeral nature of her installations. The colour of blood, the red yarn is laden with symbolism, for the artist it alludes to our connectedness to each other, the interior of the body and the complex network of neural connections in the brain. Her complex thread constructions have been compared with “drawing in the air”, and frequently include everyday objects. For her complex networks of yarn around and between the objects the artist says ”The weaving process is a way of conveying existence in the absence. I would say it is the other way round. By creating webs, I tend to wrap individual memories and shine a light on human relationships”. With this installation Chiharu Shiota seeks to examine the idea that human consciousness could exist independently of the body, somewhere beyond – somewhere else. “I feel that my body is connected to the universe but is my consciousness as well? When my feet touch the earth, I feel connected to the world, to the universe that is spread like a net of human connections, but if I don’t feel my body anymore where do I go? Where do I go when my body is gone? When my feet do not touch the ground anymore”. At the same time Shiota touches upon navigating in a broader perspective: “I’ve been concentrating on the distance we cover in our lives, and the journey we take that has an unclear destination. We are heading in a certain direction but don’t know exactly where”, says the artist. Elsewhere in the exhibition the geometry of new rhomboid sculptures echoes that found within her web installations, where seemingly haphazardly interlaced strands are in fact a network of triangles. Two dimensional canvas works further explore the artist’s use of thread as a medium. Shiota studied painting early in her education but restricted by the use of canvas and paint, she began using her own body in performance pieces, and later began to use thread as a mode for formal and conceptual expression. It allowed her to remove her physical presence yet still address the ideas that are central to her practice. Her canvases can be viewed as this journey coming full circle.

Info: Blain|Southern Gallery, 4 Hanover Square, London, Duration: 28/11/18-26/1/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, www.blainsouthern.com