Threading the Stories of Home

Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota has drawn a simple shape in thin air and at a monumental scale: a rectangle with a pitched roof, instantly recognizable as the universal symbol of home.

- Hilarie M. Sheets

BOSTON -

This ethereal installation is made of polyester cord – some 21,000 lengths of it, streaming down 7m from the ceiling of the ICA Watershed, a massive exhibition space at an active shipyard in east Boston.

A rectangular forest of blood-red cords hangs nearly to the floor of this former factory space. Inside, the cords shift to lengths of black that form a dark silhouette of a house.

Visible within this mirage-like structure are antique furnishings – a four-poster bed, rocking chair, dinette set, sewing table and chair – with a spectacular flock of paper of some 6,000 sheets fluttering above the domestic tableau.

Shiota’s new commission, titled Home Less Home, opened on May 22 under the banner of the inaugural citywide Boston Public Art Triennial and will remain till Sept 1.

“The house shape looks like a shadow because home does not exist,” Shiota said in a recent interview at the Watershed as she reached among the cords to affix the final pieces of paper with a stapler.

“Home is like something in your heart, inside,” added the soft-spoken artist, 53, who grew up in Osaka, Japan, and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1997.

Her immigrant story, both personal and age-old, echoes those of many residents living in east Boston near the shipyard, once the second-largest point of immigration in the United States, after Ellis Island.