Chiharu Shiota: The Hand Lines - Tapa blanda

"Chiharu Shiota contains more than 200 color reproductions and 10 essays treating Japanese-born (1972) artist Chiharu Shiota's work, which carries three essential themes: connections, space, and silence. Her unique network of lines that overlay objects and people connects to Japanese calligraphy: the artist's fingers become painting tools, imitating the calligrapher's brush. With calligraphy's relation to Taoism the connections continueto the cosmos, to the body, and to the paper. The lines can be veins that house blood and tears, fear of life, loss, and death, the parent-child connection. Silent space lurks beneath. Ten essays are: the hand lines (2013); a correspondence with Chiharu Shiota (2013); the works of Chiharu Shiota--a study (2012); memory, dreaming and death (2012); eloquent silence (2011); the work of dreams (2008); what lies in the world of silence (2007); something wriggling in the distant quietude, where Chiharu Shiota belongs (2007); the allegory of absence (2003); Chiharu Shiota's way into silence: moving inside the eternal triangle in art." --Eithne O'Leyne, Editor, ProtoView

Shiota's installations produce their own spaces, where hundreds of invisible threads that bond us to things can be seen. In these domestic scenarios she proposes, threads become bridges between a bride's dress and the absent subject, a piano, suitcases and a mirror. In her work, these threads are veins with tears, fear for abyss, life and death; threads that are plots of particular and universal stories, interweaving like the inverted roots of a tree, just like a rhizome through multiple branches that hold up the relationship between she and the world. The threads that transport the information and are essential in all the communication, but at the same time make up networks or wire fences that hold up the way to strangers in kinds of spaces where everyday life is in conflict with desired production.