It has just happened again with Absent Bodies by Chiharu Shiota. This beautiful art work (15 x 4.5 x 4.5 metres) takes up half the space of the Anna Schwartz Gallery. It is a huge complex web, or rather webs constructed from smooth red yarn. The obvious analogy is the network of neurons in the brain, the long axons, the ganglia where nerves meet, blown up to the size of a small house. But to reduce Shiota’s work to mere physical presence is to leach it of power and effect.

Absent Bodies by Chiharu Shiota (photograph courtesy Anna Schwartz Gallery)

Shiota’s art work knows space, possesses space in the way, say, of the Grand Canyon or the open vistas of Antarctica – or, indeed, the unfettered imagination. The tangle of red string creates an environment. Even though you stand at the edge you enter it (and yet physically you can’t enter it because the strings, criss-crossing in all directions, would stop you.) Again, that sense of an imaginative space being coterminous with your imagination. Where the threads meet and cross one another, they are not knotted – there are no knots in this tangled environment – rather they twist around one another. Through the middle the threads thin out, may even disappear, creating a tunnel that leads to two chairs at the end; they are vacant, they are waiting for you.

This is an environment of complexity and possibility, just like the imagination. It’s all about connection and space, creativity and insight. And it opens a fourth dimension – not time (in fact time is stationary in this sort of unregulated experience). The dimension running along the consciousness–unconsciousness continuum releases the imagination itself, a numinous presence that simultaneously envelops depth and motion, memory and forgetting, experience and insight. This artwork becomes you.

Chiharu Shiota (photograph by Sunhi Mang)

Absent Bodies by Chiharu Shiota is being shown at the Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne until 5 November 2016.

Arts Update is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.