Chi­haru Shiota
The Cross­ing

Chi­haru Shio­ta is best known for intri­cate and large-scale instal­la­tions that explore com­plex rela­tion­ships between body and mind. She maps elu­sive sen­sa­tions of emo­tion and mem­o­ry by weav­ing tan­gi­ble objects – cloth­ing, musi­cal instru­ments, fur­ni­ture, let­ters, and even an incin­er­at­ed piano – into exten­sive, tan­gled webs cre­at­ed with hun­dreds of metres of del­i­cate thread. By cap­tur­ing objects in this way, the artist cre­ates atmos­pher­ic, oth­er­world­ly envi­ron­ments that inspire reflec­tion on things past and med­i­ta­tion on future dreams.

Chi­haru Shio­ta presents her lat­est work, The Cross­ing, 2018, trans­form­ing the Anna Schwartz Gallery stand at the new Mel­bourne Art Fair into a sculp­tur­al field of white thread inter­wo­ven with books. The piled books resem­ble a reversed ori­gin of a rhi­zome, instead of spread­ing from an out­side source into the earth; grow­ing out­wards, expand­ing into space and time. The con­tent of the books cross­es into an infi­nite net­work which absorbs this new information.

“Every sin­gle thread car­ries a vast amount of mean­ing­ful infor­ma­tion, accu­mu­lat­ing in a mass of aware­ness. It is the his­to­ry of our inter­wo­ven, uni­ver­sal nar­ra­tives, fill­ing the space with an organ­ic struc­ture of human mat­ter. With ​‘The Cross­ing’, I want to present this inter­min­gling but com­pact sys­tem, to map the knowl­edge we share and pass on to our chil­dren, who pass it on to their chil­dren,” Chi­haru Shiota