We are currently in Adelaide for Angela’s birthday. During our visit we thought we should get a little culture, so we visited Adelaide Art Gallery. It has quite a varied collection of art, with some beautiful Australian landscape paintings and unique aboriginal art. However, one display particularly caught Angela’s eye. It is one of the permanent displays, a piece by the Japanese artist Chihura Shitoa. She is known for her string installations in many galleries around the world.
The piece in the Melrose wing of the Adelaide art gallery is called “Absence embodied”. I am not a particularly arty person and may not have fully understood its message.
The information from the gallery states
Her work attempts to represent what it means to be human. Beginning as autobiographical excavations, her installations draw on personal experiences, emotions and memories to create universally resonant works.
The work creates an immersive experience. I felt like I was in a giant red spider’s web. The dismembered limbs at the base of the display were a little disturbing as they looked like the spider’s leftovers, but I am sure they had some other meaning that eluded me.
The main reason we were drawn to this piece was its striking similarity to a blood clot. The electron micrograph picture shows a very similar web-like structure. The fibrin strands that make up a blood clot may look random, but they have an intricate design with a beauty of their own.
Although I may not be a great connoisseur of art, I was struck by the fact that the artist had produced something closely resembling a natural phenomenon. It made me wonder if the link to nature was why we saw this work as a piece of art or am I getting too deep!
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