Installation Exhibition by Shiro Masuyama, at the Hamilton Gallery
“Knitting the woolen jumper for the sheep I sheared”
Installation Exhibition by Shiro Masuyama, at the Hamilton Gallery from 8th - 30th November.
Hamilton Gallery
4 Castle Street
Sligo
Tel: +353 71 91 43686
Fax: +353 71 91 40365
Shiro Masuyama is a nomadic agent-provocateur for visual art. His nomadic approach to his art has seen him take up artists residencies everywhere from his native Tokyo to New York to Berlin, to Belfast (where he now lives) to Korea and earlier in 2012 to Sligo. It is as an outsider, a guest within a culture that Shiro feels he has the ability to examine and reinterpret the everyday features of that culture. In many ways these features will have become invisible to the people who live within it. He describes the time he came to live in Belfast, spending the first few days wandering over and back across Peace / community lines which were totally invisible and irrelevant to him, but which still form immutable boundaries for the people who live in the city.
During his recent residency in Sligo as part of the Fred Conlon Contemporary Sculpture Award Shiro focused on agricultural traditions he discovered within the landscape. One of the pieces to emerge from the residency concerned the tradition of sheep shearing and wool making. Shiro was visually aware of the abundance of sheep in rural landscapes, but there was no sign of any mills for processing sheep’s wool. Shiro decided he would shear a particular sheep, have the wool spun and and knit it into a jumper, but the jumper would be worn by the sheep that the wool had been taken from.
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