Chiharu Shiota was born in Osaka in 1972 and moved to Germany in 1997 where she now lives and works. Her main work is art performances and installations along with set design work, including her 2009 stage design for the Constanza Macras and Dorky Park staging of 'Oedipus Rex'.
In her work she weaves webs of black and red threads around installations compiled of everyday objects such as windows, suitcases or dresses. The objects are usually repeated so for example there would be a structure created out of many suitcases stacked together, or spiralling walls of windows gathered from building sites around the city.
Having looked at a few pictures of her work for this research task, I particularly like the work called 'Under the Skin and Not Any More of the Head'.
This work displays a window and what could be a wedding dress in an otherwise empty room. The web of black threads have engulfed the room and dress reminiscent of cobwebs, making me think of the dress as being neglected for a long period of time. The reason that I like this is because as soon as I saw it I thought Miss Haversham!
I'm not a huge fan of reading Dickens, I find most of his books unreadable although the stories he tells are interesting and extremely visual. (I have the same problem with D H Lawrence and Stephen King: the stories, and ideas and visions are spectacular, but I find their writing appalling and infuriating to read.)
I do love the image of Miss Haversham, although it is a sombre image. After being jilted and swindled by her fiance, Compeyson, on her wedding day, Miss Haversham sits alone in her house, still in her wedding dress and wearing just one shoe, as she was when she was getting ready on her wedding day.
Depictions of the scene, as illustrated in early publications use the pen and ink style of the illustration popular at the time. The black thread used in Chiharu Shiota's work seems to resemble that and reassert the Miss Haversham image to me even more.
In her work she weaves webs of black and red threads around installations compiled of everyday objects such as windows, suitcases or dresses. The objects are usually repeated so for example there would be a structure created out of many suitcases stacked together, or spiralling walls of windows gathered from building sites around the city.
Having looked at a few pictures of her work for this research task, I particularly like the work called 'Under the Skin and Not Any More of the Head'.
This work displays a window and what could be a wedding dress in an otherwise empty room. The web of black threads have engulfed the room and dress reminiscent of cobwebs, making me think of the dress as being neglected for a long period of time. The reason that I like this is because as soon as I saw it I thought Miss Haversham!
I'm not a huge fan of reading Dickens, I find most of his books unreadable although the stories he tells are interesting and extremely visual. (I have the same problem with D H Lawrence and Stephen King: the stories, and ideas and visions are spectacular, but I find their writing appalling and infuriating to read.)
I do love the image of Miss Haversham, although it is a sombre image. After being jilted and swindled by her fiance, Compeyson, on her wedding day, Miss Haversham sits alone in her house, still in her wedding dress and wearing just one shoe, as she was when she was getting ready on her wedding day.
Depictions of the scene, as illustrated in early publications use the pen and ink style of the illustration popular at the time. The black thread used in Chiharu Shiota's work seems to resemble that and reassert the Miss Haversham image to me even more.
Thisgot me thinking about how I would achieve this effect if I wanted to set a stage or set for a production similar in mood to Silas House in Great Expectations. Using wool, particularly white wool, in a similar way to Chiharu Shiota, and pinning one end of each thread to boards which can be set behind furniture or other props, and the other end attached to lengths of wood secured in the rigging outside the field of the view of the cameras. This would give a long-neglected web effect.
It also adds to the mood by making the viewer or audience think that witnessing any action from beyond or within the 'web' is a bit like eavesdropping or trespassing, and feel that we shouldn't really be there, which is a good emotional effect to pull off as it would emotionally engage the viewer with the action and characters.
Whilst researching Chiharu Shiota's work I came across this article from the Guardian online, dated 24 February 2010, which tells of her performance work and installations, which "explore the hinterlands between waking life and dream states and chasing faded memories..."
I think that sentence seems to sum up Chiharu Shiota's work well.
In her best-known installations she weaves black yarn into hectic webs that take over entire galleries and in which personal objects are found cocooned. The Japanese Berlin-based artist has ensnared everything from the wedding dresses seen in last year's Walking in My Mind exhibition at the Hayward gallery, to a grand piano and childhood toys. In one of her sleeping performances, you might even find Shiota herself ensconced beneath layers of mesh.
Born in Osaka, the artist moved from Japan to Germany in 1997, to study under the performance art maven Marina Abramović. For one of her early works, Try and Go Home of 1998, Shiota fasted for four days and then smeared her naked body with earth before taking to a muddy hole. With its suggestions of both womb and grave, the work hinged on feelings of loss and oblivion that have underscored much of her work since. A later installation first shown in 2000, Memory of Skin, featured similarly dirt-stained dresses, suggesting knowledge that won't wash off.
"It would be nice to banish every trace of myself, my
looks, my papers, my passport, and even my fingerprints," Shiota has said,
"and only create my works in dialogue with the cosmos." While
exploring the hinterlands between waking life and dream states and chasing
fading memories, in Shiota's labyrinthine installations the passage into
oblivion always feels close at hand.
Below are images of some of her other works:
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