Chiharu Shiota Installations
"I live in my imagination. As long as I have an imagination, I'll keep creating. I keep creating and keep dreaming."
Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese artist who frequently uses string, yarn, and wool to create eerie, evocative art installations.
After trying her hand at painting, she made a move from making images on flat surfaces to creating three dimensional works, using yarn as a drawing tool.
Chiharu weaves her string and yarn in, around, and through objects, evoking neural networks and clouds. Her installations are so jam-packed with string making connections between objects and the walls, ceilings, and floors that it's hard to know where to start to unravel the stories and the connections of the items she uses - keys, dresses, boat shapes, and suitcases.
Using everyday string and yarn, Chiharu can make long or short visual connections between objects, or create an impenetrable web. Is that a safe cocoon, or are you trapped in a spider's web?
Her pieces are such dreamy, magical realism-type landscapes that they bypass the logical part of your brain and go straight to that place where you try to sort out what that dream or nightmare you just had was trying to tell you.
It's amazing how she creates such deep feelings of unease and apprehension with yarn and string.
Some of her pieces have all the hallmarks of a horror movie. I can't help but wonder about the people these objects belonged to, their stories, and their fates.
"All string is connected. When I was using keys, it's connecting humans with (other) humans - it's a relationship...If this line is cut, the relationship is cut. Or (if) the line is tangled, the relationship is tangled, or the relationship is loose. Everything I can explain with my string."
Click on the image below to hear Chiharu talk about her installation Uncertain Journey, from 2016, and to watch the creation of this masterful installation.
For a longer examination of her work and her process, watch the video below.
Want to watch more artists/crafts-persons at work? Spend 3.5 minutes watching a time-lapse video of Canadian textile artist Laurie Swim creating a landscape quilt.
Or, see how Jacqui Fink transforms wool into large-scale projects.
And, see what sisters Lorna and Jill Watt do with yarn in public spaces.
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