Try Me_Chiharu Shiota

I was drawn to the pieces of Chiharu Shiota at try me because of the imagery in the work.  I have been struggling with a sculptural idea based off of an knit sweater made for a young girl.  Shiota’s work captured the fragility of the garment in non-obtrusive manner, which is an issue I have with my sculptural work.  When researching the artist I found an installation work from the same time period which also deals with the same imagery; again l enjoyed how she used the space to enhance the work, but did not sacrifice the delicate nature of the subject.  The work also reminded me of the work of Anselm Kiefer, who has also been a great influence on my sculptural work.    

The first image from Try Me is “Untitled” by way of Amie.

The second image also from Try call “Untitled_Childrens dress” by way of Amie.

The 3^rd image is from Chiharu Shiota’s website ( http://www.chiharu-shiota.com/index.html  )

The last image is a sketch I’ve been working on for the sculptural piece mentioned before.  I found this particular piece of clothing when cleaning out old boxes after my mother’s death.  I asked her mother about the piece and she did not recognize it so I figured it had to belong to my dad’s sister and it just happened to get mixed in with my mother’s things.  Upon asking my aunt about it we realized we did not know the origins of the garment, but we both felt too sentimental about the object to get rid of it.  It was still sentimental to us even though the sentiment had been lost.  I wanted to juxtapose this idea of “lost sentiment” with the feeling I had when I broke my mother Frankoma tea pitcher, which I would classify as a “sentimental lose” since I could very easily buy another tea pitcher off of ebay that look exactly like hers, but when I did to this it actally made me feel even worse about the broken object and caused me to miss my mother’s fresh brewed tea.

-MLMattax