Chi­haru Shiota
State of Being

Chi­haru Shio­ta makes man­i­fest invis­i­ble webs of attach­ment. Her works pre­serve and memo­ri­alise the threads that unite each of us; they are infi­nite, unseen but certain. 

State of Being is an asser­tion of this con­nect­ed­ness. The space is qui­et, enveloped in a delib­er­ate still­ness where time has been frozen so that it might be more care­ful­ly observed. Pre­sent­ed for the first time is a sculp­tur­al human fig­ure in red, beneath but con­nect­ed to an immense web that spans the gallery from wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceil­ing. Each indi­vid­ual line of thread, lead­ing to innu­mer­able meet­ing points, can be traced to no end. 

On a more inti­mate scale, sculp­tures and works on both can­vas and paper offer access to Shiota’s think­ing: sin­gu­lar con­stel­la­tions in the uni­verse that the artist com­mands. Reclaimed love let­ters, diaries and pho­tographs – found by the artist in flea mar­kets – are arte­facts of oth­er lives lived in oth­er places. Arranged as if falling, their com­po­si­tion in com­plex arrange­ments of thread sus­pends them in time. This tech­nique of inter­laced thread is also realised on two-dimen­sion­al can­vas­es, pre­sent­ing the sen­sa­tion of the infi­nite as still potent through lines too numer­ous to count.

State of Being is an embod­i­ment of the com­plex net­works that gov­ern both our exter­nal and inter­nal lives. Chi­haru Shiota’s prac­tice, in both two and three dimen­sions, traces the line that dis­tin­guish­es the body from the mind and blurs it, delib­er­ate­ly haz­ing the way we move through our own consciousness.

Claire Sum­mers