Absence Embodied

Born in 1972 in Osaka, Japan, Chiharu Shiota has based her studio in Berlin since 1999. Over the course of three decades Shiota has built an international career with her iconic thread installations, as well as her performances, videos and drawings. In 2015 she represented Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale with The Key in the Hand.

Her large-scale architectonic works often employ black, white or red wool as the thread connecting found, donated or used objects, such as shoes, dresses, suitcases, keys, beds, chairs and pianos – symbolic artefacts that relate to ideas of geographic displacement, identity and motherhood.

Commissioned for the Art Gallery of South Australia, Absence Embodied is a site-specific installation comprised of over 200 kilometres of red wool. The work also represents the first occasion on which the artist cast parts of her own and her family’s bodies. On the ground sits a cluster of nine bronze casts of the artist’s own limbs, seven plaster casts of her daughter’s hands, and a bronze sculpture of three entwined hands – Shiota and her husband clasping their daughter’s small hand. These fragments anchor a great charge of red thread, which extends upwards and outwards to form a three-dimensional labyrinthine web.

Shiota reflects:

'In making the work, sometimes the string gets tangled, or loses tension, or is cut, much like human relationships. Relationships can become tangled, lost or severed. Red string symbolises the body, blood or relationships between humans. There is an expression in Japanese, akai-ito de musu bareru, which means ‘two people whose lives are bound together with a red string, it describes human connection’.

Leigh Robb, Curator of Contemporary Art