After a foundation degree in painting at Seika University in Kyoto, Chiharu Shiota chose to pursue her artistic studies in Berlin, turning her focus to performance. Her practice soon shifted towards site-specific installations and the creation of vast ephemeral environments. She delicately weaves knotted threads to create fantastical scenes combining a variety of salvaged objects: window frames, worn musical instruments, cardboard suitcases, rusty keys, books and old used clothes. Her increasingly ambitious installations, to be found in museums worldwide, have become her signature; one by one they build a complex body of work that questions our notions of existence and transcendence.

With Memory under The Skin, Chiharu Shiota once again explores one of her favourite themes: clothing as “second skin”. She explains that clothes “can even be more important than skin because they offer the opportunity to express so much about each of us.

They say more than a person’s skin colour, age or nationality. They are always with us in our daily life, becoming the personification of our memories, our existence. When we die, our existence is reflected by our clothes and the objects we surround ourselves with. Existence in absence: it is one of the themes of my work.”

In a contrasting approach, she also experiments with more permanent materials: “I wanted to recreate hands, my husband’s, my daughter’s and my own, in plaster then in bronze. I wanted to create something that will remain after I die. For me, the material is an extension of the body, like a memory under the skin.” Both intimate and aspiring to universality, this subtly figurative new work in bronze and metal thread embodies a wholly original approach to sculpture, as the receptacle for an uncertain world elsewhere.