"I check my phone first thing in the morning, I read any new emails, I check message on my social media, I listen to voicemails. Each day we are targeted with an endless amount of information. It has never been easier to receive information from all over the world. But all the information changes all the time. I watch the news with my family every day. The volume of information is like a wave, swallowing my body. It is difficult to orient oneself in this new world. Where is the surface in this ocean of information? Our human body is not adapting and changing at the same speed, so it is becoming more complex to find the real meaning of life. What is our purpose? Where is our destination in life? People believe that death is our ultimate destination and the end of life, but I believe time is a circular construct, and when we die, our consciousness transcends into another dimension. There is no beginning or end. The boats float within the space, like a body floating in water. Each line is like an emotion. Using threads, lines and rope is something that allows me to explore breath and space like a line in a painting. An accumulation of black lines forms a surface like the night sky which gradually expands into the Universe. But what if it is rather the bottom of the ocean. There is no light at the bottom, everything is black. The architectural shape of the boat lets the passengers only move forward. We struggle to define our path, our human condition forces us to look forward searching for a destiny although we have no safe points of orientation, we travel on the open ocean without a sense of direction." - Chiharu Shiota
With the month-long lockdown 2.0 thankfully ended, I discovered that there was a new installation by Chiharu Shiota in town. Making haste, I hot-footed it to König Gallery (a new gallery to me), to see Navigating the Unknown. It was another of Shiota's hauntingly ethereal thread installations like that seen last year at the now closed Blain Southern gallery (here). The main focus of Navigating the Unknown is a trio of deserted boats, suspended and cast adrift in a sea of black string. It raises questions. Where are, and what happened to the pilots of these vessels? Shiota evokes the mystery of the Mary Celeste - a brigantine ship discovered similarly abandoned by its crew adrift with everything on board otherwise undisturbed and intact in 1872. The mood of this installation with the stark black of the thread and vessels also brought to mind images of the mythological boatman Charon transporting the souls of the dead on their final journey across the River Styx. The sense of mystery and evocations, encouraging a narrative and storytelling in the mind of the viewer are the strength of Shiota's installations. This sense of mystery also pervades her smaller boxed sculptures containing sacred and secular objects shrouded in impossibly, dense webs of thread. This exhibition also gives visitors a chance to examine Shiota's thought process and idea development through her drawings executed in her severe, powerful red and black colour palette. The two beautifully nuanced textural thread paintings on canvas here resemble expansive NASA pictures of distant galaxies and star systems, or microscopic tissue samples seen on slides from a biology lab. They had me excited for the possibilities of further exploration with my own works involving stich and thread (here).
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