“Threads become tangled, intertwined, broken off, unraveled. They constantly reflect a part of my mental state, as if they were expressing the state of human relationships.”

—Shiota Chiharu

At the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, I visited an exhibit entitled—The Soul Trembles. It was a huge display of sculptures, videos, photos, drawings, and most impressive to me, some large scale installations. All from the artist Shiota Chiharu, a Japanese artist who is based in Berlin, Germany.

Several of the installations consisted of mass amounts of string tied to items in the room and tacked to the walls, ceiling, and floors. The strings interconnect and create immense webs. A quote on the wall by the installations explain that “The black expresses the vast expanse of this deep universe while the red expresses the red threads that connect one person to another as well as the color of blood.” Walking thru the rooms of string, you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the obvious amount of time and energy that went into creating these enormous works of art. And to think that when this exhibit is over, all the string will be torn down and it can never be recreated exactly as it was. Not to mention that someone will have to fill thousand upon thousands of tiny holes from the mass amount of staples used to hold it all up!  

The exhibit also gave me inspiration for the many things that I could do with all the yarn I have accumulated over the many years of saying “I’m going to learn to knit!” Even after the last time I gave up on that idea, I still purchase more yarn! To this day I have never learned to knit, but at least I know that with lots of free time, all that yarn is just a staple gun away from becoming Art!