Building a Home From 100 Miles of Cord

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

This ethereal installation is made of polyester cord — some 21,000 lengths of it, streaming down 23 feet 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, some 6,000 sheets, fluttering above the domestic tableau. Shiota’s new commission, titled “Home Less Home,” opened Thursday under the banner of the inaugural citywide Boston Public Art Triennial and will remain on view through 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 and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1997.