Chiharu Shiota

Chiharu Shiota, “Traces of Memory”, 2013 Installation at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh

When Shiota visited the Mattress Factory in 2011, she was inspired by the old Victorian rowhouse at 516 Sampsonia and curious about the previous inhabitants and their lives. “I work always with someone’s memory because it is strong and it exists but I cannot touch the memory,” says Shiota about her work in an interview with Felice and Shannon of the Mattress Factory Education Department.

She describes her use of black yarn as a 3D drawing material that she weaves through the air to create space, and sees the act of weaving the yarn in these spaces as a way to give form to memory and create a new world. For Shiota, the yarn gives form to unsent feelings, memories, and history. Once the installation is cut down, the memory of the installation is what remains.

Human relationships are complex, and she describes the yarn as analogous to human connections: “The string makes tension or is tangled or is loose. The string is like feeling or relationship to people, and the relationship is connected, or loose or tight. I feel like this is just like a mirror of my feelings.”

Note: Chiharu Shiota is one of my favorite sculptors/installers. There are three more posts on this blog of other installations.

Chiharu Shiota

Installation Sculpture by Chiharu Shiota

Born in 1972 in Osaka, Japan, Chiharu Shiota lives and works in Berlin where she was a student of Marina Abramović and Rebecca Horn. She will represent Japan at the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale. His artistic creation combines both contemporary inspirations and Japanese heritage. . His drawings to installations and performances, the artist deals with many apprehensions, by a confusing effusion.

The objects she uses are mainly of old suitcases, letters, old pianos, ghostly robes, and all call a flashback. But the peculiarity of his work lies in the recurrent use of woven son, cables, metal rods, which transform the space into a gigantic spider web. Many place the body as the main subject of his work, but indirectly we distinguish being in this web of messages. The shapes become shadows, envelopes are empty and the majority of its installations, objects are searched by this son of entanglement, which we do not distinguish the borders.

Chiharu Shiota

Sculpture Installations by Chiharu Shiota

Chiharu Shiota (塩田千春 Shiota Chiharu?) is a Japanese installation artist born in 1972 in Osaka. She has been living and working in Berlin since 1996. Shiota studied at the Seika University in Kyoto and at various schools in Germany and is represented by ARNDT in Berlin and Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris.

Shiota’s oeuvre contains various art performances and installations, in which she uses various everyday objects such as beds, windows, dresses, shoes and suitcases. She explores the relationships between past and present, living and dying, and memories of people implanted into objects. To these Shiota adds intricate, web-like threads of black and red.