‘She weaves black yarn into hectic webs’, and creates amazing web like structures around personal objects often in gallery spaces. And she no doubt gives a great competition to a well known super hero ‘THE SPIDER MAN’.
This Japanese artist named Chiharu Shiota is a no less than a real life spider woman- one who weaves an immense amount of yarn into a cocoon-like environment. In her best-known installations she weaves hectic webs that take over entire place and in which personal objects are found cocooned. This Japanese-Berlin based artist has ensnared everything from wedding dresses to ground pianos and childhood toys and staircase and sometimes entire rooms.
In her latest art, she covered an 860-sqf room at the gallery Daniel Templon in Paris. She weaved entire room with a black wool thread of 66,000 feet of length i.e; 12.5 miles, more the distance up Mt. Everest and back. And she did the entire task in just three days that too without anybody’s help.
Shiota’s use of these strings transforms environment into something between prison and womb. She was born in Osaka and began with painting, but at present she paints only “in the air” with her threads. She deals generously with her dreams. Her installations and performances leads into sleep, night and the self-forgetfulness of the dreaming body. Far from Japan, her loss of orientation and her fear of losing the personal and individual have become the reason of her art.
The entire art began in 1996 in Japan with the work ‘Return to Consciousness’ in which Shiota first created one of her webs of black wool thread that dominated the entire exhibition space and that gave viewers visual but not physical access to the space, as if they were spider webs that have spread unchecked, she carefully crossed and knotted her threads from floor to ceiling and wall to wall by untiring manual labor. Since then, the idea of the web of strands is always present in her installations.
One can relate to her work, it denotes the boundary, limitations, fear, darkness and we can aptly calls it ‘THE DARK OBSESSION’.
