Chiharu Shiota’s immersive installations transform gallery spaces into dense emotional landscapes woven from thread, memory, and absence.
The solo exhibition catalogue produced by Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London provides a comprehensive visual and critical exploration of the artist’s immersive, thread-based installations.
Known for her large-scale networks of yarn, these site-specific, emotionally charged environments explore themes of life, death, memory, the human body, and what the artist describes as “existence in the absence.”
The photographs focus on the exhibition’s vivid red threads as they stretch, knot, and weave through the gallery spaces, creating dense immersive environments that appear both fragile and overwhelming. Particular attention is given to the intricate details within the installations, where suspended keys emerge from the tangled networks of thread, suggesting memory, loss, access, and absence, while handwritten letters and fragments of paper become entangled within the woven structures, adding deeply personal traces of communication and human experience.
