Stepping into an installation by Chiharu Shiota often feels like entering a living memory. Thousands of strands of wool stretch across ceilings and walls, forming immense webs that envelop objects from ordinary life—keys, shoes, letters, suitcases, beds. Suspended within these tangled constellations, the objects seem to drift between presence and absence, like fragments of forgotten stories.

Painting, she realized, felt limiting. The canvas confined gesture and emotion to two dimensions.

objects seem to drift between presence and absence, like fragments of forgotten stories.

Shiota’s installations are among the most emotionally resonant works in contemporary art today. They transform simple materials into immersive environments that explore universal questions: how memory survives, how relationships bind us together, and how fragile human life can be.

Her exhibition “Threads of Life” at the Hayward Gallery demonstrates the full emotional and spatial power of her practice, weaving monumental thread structures through the gallery’s brutalist architecture. together. In others, they knot into dense labyrinths, reflecting confusion, grief, or emotional turbulence.

Drawing in Space: The Evolution of a Signature Language

Shiota’s artistic path did not begin with thread. Born in Osaka in 1972, she initially trained as a painter before gradually turning toward performance and installation. A pivotal chapter came during her studies in Berlin under performance art pioneer Marina Abramović.

Painting, she realized, felt limiting. The canvas confined gesture and emotion to two dimensions.

Thread offered liberation.

With thread I could draw throughout the entire space.

– Shiota has said.

Instead of pigment on canvas, lines could stretch across rooms, tracing emotional landscapes in midair.

Over time, thread evolved into her primary artistic language. Its physical qualities—flexible, fragile, endlessly interlacing—mirrored the complexity of human relationships. In some works, the threads seem to bind objects gently together. In others, they knot into dense labyrinths, reflecting confusion, grief, or emotional turbulence.

The Monumental Web: Everyday Objects as Memory Carriers

Central to Shiota’s installations is the use of found objects. Suitcases, keys, letters, shoes, and hospital beds appear repeatedly throughout her work.

These objects are rarely chosen for aesthetic reasons alone. Instead, they act as vessels of lived experience.

A single key, for instance, carries the idea of home, belonging, and security. A suitcase suggests movement, migration, and the unknown.

Shiota collects many of these objects from flea markets and donation boxes, allowing strangers’ possessions to become part of a shared narrative. Once suspended inside vast webs of yarn, they transform into quiet witnesses of human life.

The resulting installations can fill entire gallery spaces, often constructed on-site by hand using thousands of balls of thread. Visitors walk beneath or through these structures, becoming part of the web themselves.

“During Sleep”: A Meditation on Mortality

One of the most powerful works presented in the Hayward exhibition is During Sleep (2026).

In this installation, hospital beds lie entangled within thick black thread stretching across the gallery like an ominous cloud. At scheduled moments throughout the exhibition, performers occupy the beds, their bodies partially obscured by the dense web.

The atmosphere feels simultaneously intimate and unsettling.

The piece reflects Shiota’s ongoing contemplation of mortality—an idea shaped profoundly by her personal life. The artist has faced ovarian cancer twice, first in 2005 and again in 2017. The second diagnosis arrived while she was preparing the landmark exhibition The Soul Trembles at the Mori Art Museum.

That confrontation with vulnerability and possible loss sharpened the philosophical depth of her work.

Shiota has spoken about contemplating the fate of the soul—what remains of identity if the physical body disappears. Thread became a metaphor for that invisible continuity connecting human existence.

Threads and Textiles: A Dialogue with Yin Xiuzhen

The Hayward exhibition unfolds alongside a parallel show by Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen, whose installations also use textiles and found materials.

Both artists share an interest in memory embedded within everyday objects. Yet their approaches diverge.

Yin constructs cities and architectural forms from worn clothing, transforming garments into tactile maps of collective experience. Shiota’s thread, by contrast, functions less as fabric and more as line—an abstract medium that connects objects through invisible emotional pathways.

Curator Yung Ma describes the pairing as an exploration of how textiles can carry identity and personal history. Although the artists emerged on the international stage during the late 1990s, their works speak from different cultural perspectives while converging around shared human themes.

Together, their exhibitions reveal how ordinary materials—thread, cloth, clothing—can hold extraordinary emotional weight.

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life, During Sleep (2026)

Architecture of Emotion

The setting of the Hayward Gallery intensifies Shiota’s installations. Its raw concrete surfaces and angular geometry create a stark backdrop against which the delicate webs of thread appear almost organic.

The tension between brutalist architecture and fragile material generates a powerful visual contrast. Dense red or black networks stretch from floor to ceiling, transforming the gallery into a kind of emotional architecture.

Standing within these spaces, viewers often feel both dwarfed and connected. The installations surround the body while hinting at invisible networks that extend beyond the room—relationships, memories, histories.

The threads become metaphors for the unseen structures linking human lives.

The Invisible Lines That Bind Us

Chiharu Shiota’s art occupies a rare space where personal experience expands into universal reflection. Her installations do not simply represent memory; they recreate its atmosphere—fragmented, layered, and interwoven.

A visitor walking through her tangled landscapes might encounter a cluster of keys or a solitary suitcase suspended in midair. Each object carries an implied story, yet none is fully revealed.

That openness invites viewers to project their own memories into the work.

Through thousands of strands of thread, Shiota constructs an invisible map of human connection—one where lives intersect, drift apart, and sometimes reunite across time.

Within these vast webs, the ordinary becomes profound, and the fragile threads of existence reveal their quiet, enduring strength.