Two female artists that are drawing on childhood experiences to create fantastical exhibitions weaving together notions of time and identity are Alice Anderson and Chiharu Shiota.
The woman is trapped in the tower. She cannot be seen but we know that she is up there, waiting remembering. From a tiny window, her glossy red hair cascades down the tower’s white walls across the floor. Circling around sculptures, photography and film about forgotten children and broken dolls, these coiled piles of synthetic hair in artist Alice Anderson’s latest installation, 'time reversal' suggest an enchanted lair- a nest, or a trap. This very different work has been filling Soho’s Riflemaker Gallery during the month of March.
Just a few streets away Chiharu Shiota has an exhibition at the Haunch of Vension. The Osaka-born artist is renowned for ensnaring gallery-goers in fantastical female worlds by weaving yarn around totems from memories and dreams- wedding dresses, burnt pianos, and old toys and even sleeping women. With their spooky, compulsively realised work sporting abundance of weave, these neighbouring artists offer bewitching meditations on time and identity.
Uprooted at a young age, Anderson cites her parents’ split as a seminal moment on her path to becoming an artist. Her mother is French-Algerian and her father is English, a combination she means never worked. Therefore her mother took her away from England and asked young Alice never to mention England or her father again. Though ears later Alice Anderson came back to London to study at Goldsmith's. Her skin is pale ivory and her long hair is red. A colour she sais is also the one for her drawings, as for the internal body, of love, of sex, of pain, of violence, of sacrifice, of shame, of anger and of lipstick.
In 2006 Anderson turned herself into a doll with help of Madame Tussauds. The resulting scaled-down of the artist features in the photography series Master Puppet, holding marionette strings while Anderson clasps it to her chest. In an attempt to be rid of the double’s uncanny influence Anderson put the doll in a glass coffin for her 2008 “Spectres” show at the Picasso Museum near Cannes.
Shiota also dealswith a yen for her lost childhood while attempting to broach the mysteries of dream worlds. In revealing performances, she has presented herself asleep, allowing onlookers to share a moment that is both intimate alienating.
Having moved from Japan to Germany in 1997, Shiota has also had to deal with displacement. For an earlier work, In Silence, the artist set light to a piano, then cocooned its charred form in black yarn. This violent act had its roots in a traumatic childhood experience, when she found a similar burnt piano in the fire-ravaged house of her neighbour. Dialouge From DNA, a project staged in Poland, Germany and Japan, invited local audiences to share their memories through donated shoes. Scores of items- from old high heels to novelty slippers- were collected, each bearing the imprint of someone’s journey through life.
At Haunch of Vension, Shiota is mining the spiritual as much as the bodily, with old windows stacked to the rafters to form a cavernous, church-like environment. Salvaged from building sites in Berlin, they tap into the secret history of the city. The idea was that when one look at the disregarded windows it could be like imagining the people who looked through the window from East Berlin to the West. For both artists, time’s web entangles, its threads collapsing as we try to grasp them. I admire their way of using the space in such a clever and interesting way.
