Toshiko Oiyama: Flow

At DRAW Space in June 2025, Toshiko Oiyama explores what it means for all things to be in a constant state of change. This concept is explored through subtle interventions such as puncturing, cutting, tearing folding and sewing.

For Toshiko Oiyama, drawing is a way of asking questions that cannot be answered in words. One question she has been asking for over a decade in her art practice is what it means for all things to be in a constant state of change. Flow explores the nature of transience through various experimental approaches, which can be playful and/or ambiguous.

In her work, things flow into something else. Flat 2D drawings are transformed into 3D by cutting and lifting, or turned into bold forms that come off the wall.

The materiality of paper, ink, pencil and thread is thoroughly exploited and brought out for them to interact, while magnets and pins turn themselves into drawing. Happy accidents among the media are welcomed and are set to work with the consciously created marks. The free-flowing ink dances with systematic grids that appear and disappear. Randomness and logic intermingle.

Is there an unchanging force beneath the surface transience that we live in? After all, physicists the world over have been trying to find the Theory of Everything. The exhibition Flow explores the fundamental nature of transience, which also seems to contain – paradoxically – the unchanging law that governs everything.

Exhibition runs 6pm Thursday 5 June to 5pm Sunday 22 June at DRAW Space, 31A Enmore Road, Newtown Gadigal.

More information on the DRAW Space website.