We had a lecture last Wednesday on drawing and different forms of drawing. The artist Chiharu Shiota was mentioned, as her work is almost like drawing with thread.

Chiharu Shiota is an artist who was born in Japan and works in Berlin. She makes humongous installations out of threads. In my eyes her work looks like a child’s nightmare, or an etching come to life.

This is obviously very immersive work, you can walk through the sculpture. As you walk, your perspective changes what the overlapping threads look like, creating a dynamic piece. In some parts there is so much thread that whole areas of the room look completely black. I think it this, coupled with the spikey nature of the thread and the colour chosen that makes the sculpture look like a child’s nightmare come to life. You have no idea what creatures could be lurking in the dark, and even though there are lights in the room it still looks pretty dim. You can see that the lights in the room make the surrounding thread look like spider webs, which increases the eerie feeling of the installation.

The piece ‘Sleeping is Like Death’ is of three hospital beds, surrounded and joined by webs of black thread. This is another nightmare-ish piece. The hospital beds look old, like typical 1950s asylum beds. I think that my mind came to this conclusion because I was unconsciously thinking of the thread as a representation of the mind of the people in the beds, and that they must be mad.

One way to perceive this would be that the thread has created little cocoons around each bed, maybe insinuating that the inhabitants have tried to make themselves feel safe; a representation of a sort of mental safety blanket. They could have tried to push their illness out of their mind and that is why it isn’t directly on top of them.

This kind of art isn’t something that I would have usually given much thought to, however I am very interested in the human psyche and the portrayal of insanity in art, and so this has interested me a lot.