Artist Statement

Tomoko Yamada is a Japanese-born artist based in Broome, Western Australia. After working in commercial photography and creative direction in Japan, she relocated to Australia, where her practice evolved into research-led, site-responsive installations exploring memory, migration, cultural heritage, and human connection.

After relocating, Yamada encountered the shared maritime histories between Japan and Australia through Broome’s pearling heritage. She learned traditional fishing-net weaving techniques from an elderly Japanese pearl diver who had migrated to Australia after the Second World War. As someone who also crossed the sea to begin a new life in Australia, she came to understand the fishing net not simply as a functional object, but as a vessel carrying histories of migration, labour, cultural exchange, and intergenerational memory.

Working primarily with handmade fishing nets, Yamada creates installations that investigate how relationships between people, place, and history become interwoven over time. Rather than functioning as fixed symbols, knots become points of intersection where people, places, memories, histories, and events converge. The lines connecting these intersections embody not only movement through time and space, but also the continuous flow of experience from which relationships emerge, evolve, and are continually rewoven. Walking, dialogue, archival research, and collaboration with local communities form an integral part of her process, allowing each work to emerge through its specific site and context.

Rather than producing static objects, her installations operate as open systems that evolve through making, encounter, and participation. Her practice considers weaving not simply as a method of construction, but as a way of understanding how people, cultures, and environments continually shape and reconfigure one another.