[1] Educated in Japan, Australia, and Germany, Shiota interweaves materiality and the psychic perception of the space to explore ideas around the body and flesh, personal narratives that engage with memory, territory, and alienation.

Her signature installations, which consist of dazzling, intricate networks of threads stretching across gallery rooms, made the artist rise to fame in the 2000s.

Mostly renowned for her vast, room-spanning webs of threads or hoses, she links abstract networks with concrete everyday objects such as keys, window frames, dresses, shoes, boats and suitcases.

[8] Her early works are performance pieces, many of which were recorded in photographs and video, in which, for example, she uses mud, while later large-scale installations integrate personal objects (e.g. shoes) given to her by other people.

[10] Thin plastic tubing filled with blood-like liquid is also occasionally used to suggest the umbilical support of a body, symbolizing nurturing and the beginning of a new life.

Shiota's thread installation works developed from the artist's experience of moving between places out of which evolved the desire to cover her possessions in yarn thereby marking a personal territory.

Over several years, the artist collected hundreds of old windows from construction sites in former East Berlin out of her curiosity of how residents from the two sides viewed each other’s way of life.

[18] Thus, through the creation of works such as House of Windows, Shiota probes into the in-betweenness as she was feeling culturally and artistically distant to both her home country and current place of residence.

Standing as an extremely fragile dwelling, House of Windows evokes the liminal boundaries between the personal and the historical through visual narratives embedded in used objects.

In Shiota’s constructions, the red or black strings stretches from, reaches, surrounds, connects, encloses, and obscures the collected objects in varying ways.

[27] In an attempt to use neglected sites in Pristina as art exhibition spaces for Manifesta 14, Shiota hung hundreds of red yarn threads from the Great Hammam’s ceiling.

With the end of the tunnel facing the farmed rice field and ocean, it shows an appreciation for the ecological beauty and the islanders' connection with the environment, rendering a sense of hope and openness in spite of its depopulation over decades.