In my last post, I talked about my visit to the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, specifically about a work titled Dark Matter Collective by Olafur Eliasson.
Today I’m talking about another of the pieces that caught my attention inside the gallery, and even more later when I found out more about it: Absence Embodied.
This piece can only be described as an installation. It’s an entire room criss-crossed in taut red wool, each piece weaving in and out of others. On the floor in the centre of the room, at what looks like the origin point for all the threads, are seven cast bronze hands and feet.
What first caught my attention was the colour—the bright red visible through an open door in an otherwise white gallery. Once I got into the room, I was astounded by the sheer scale. Like Dark Matter Collective, this is not a piece that can be moved. The ends of the red threads are nailed to the floor, the wall, the ceiling. They’re not going anywhere. I was caught up in the detail of the creation without knowing what I was looking at beyond a bland title on the wall:
Later, reading the transcriptions of the gallery audio tour (something I would have done in the gallery if I’d realised the audiotour had transcriptions!), I discovered more about the piece. Absence Embodied was created by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, who now lives and works in Germany. She studied in Australia, which is where she was first inspired to create her signature ‘thread installations’.
Absence Embodied took nearly a month to install and uses more than 220 kilometres of red wool, enough to knit roughly 100 jumpers for an average adult. She describes her technique as ‘drawing in the air’ and says string is like a mirror of her feelings (an echo of Dark Matter Collective, which used literal mirrors).
Shiota chose red for this installation for its symbolism, as ‘red string represents the body, blood or relationships between humans’. The audioguide references the Japanese expression ‘akai ito de musubareru’ (sometimes musubareteru), meaning ‘two people whose lives are bound together with red string’.
In Asian cultures, the red thread is often used in reference to romantic relationships, but extends to other relationships as well. The bond may be tight or loose. It may get tangled and knotted. It may be severed, cut or broken.
Japan isn’t a Christian nation and the installation isn’t intended to have any religious significance, but Shiota’s choice of red—scarlet—thread has Christian significance. Biblically, scarlet thread symbolises redemption through sacrifice and the shedding of blood, from Genesis to Jesus to Revelation.
The body of Jesus, the blood of Jesus, our relationship with Jesus.
The room reminded me of a well-known novel, The Scarlet Thread by Francine Rivers. In the novel, a scarlet thread in a tapestry symbolises the character’s personal and spiritual growth, an echo back to the use of scarlet threads in the Bible: Isaac and Esau, Rahab at Jericho, the blood of Passover.
The scarlet thread binds us to Jesus, and to each other.
The difference between the red thread of Absence Embodied and the scarlet thread of the Bible is that Jesus is that while the scarlet thread might be tangled or torn, while we might sometimes feel that Jesus is a long way away, He is never absent and he never cuts the thread.