WEAVING WEBS OF EXISTENCE
Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota works wonders with wool, transforming her thoughts, feelings and inner battles into moving and haunting installations of immense beauty that speak of the human experience. Writer Y-JEAN MUN-DELSALLE finds out what makes her tick, her thoughts on life, death and art, and why fear is necessary for her to make art.
It might not be considered a noble material, but Chiharu Shiota has made yarn her signature medium in the creation of powerful, delicate and enveloping environments in which recovered objects like suitcases, shoes, dresses, bed frames, windows and doors are sometimes suspended in a web.
Inhabiting immense spaces with networks of string or wool interwoven in all directions, from floor to ceiling, that represent the complexity of human relationships, she builds monumental, site-specific artistic installations of architectural richness.
Intended to be places of solace and contemplation, they invite visitors to wander inside and get lost. Aware of the transformational quality of art,
