Artist Biography:

Tomoko Yamada is a Japanese-born artist based in Broome, Western Australia. After working in commercial photography and design in Japan, she relocated to Australia, where she now develops her practice primarily in fibre-based work, installation, and research-driven art projects.

At the core of her practice is the concept and material of the “thread.” Drawing on her experience learning traditional fishing net weaving techniques, she uses thread as a medium to explore memory, time, and cultural connection. In her work, thread functions not only as a material but also as a conceptual tool for weaving relationships, histories, and embodied traces of experience.

Her practice engages with ideas of place, migration, cultural context, and everyday visual perception. Through these elements, she transforms abstract concepts and layered memories into spatial installations. Her works are not fixed objects but evolving structures that remain open to change over time, emphasising process over final form.

Notable projects include Common language of thread: Flow Movement, presented in contexts such as Perth Institute of Contemporary Art Studio Residency, the Fringe Festival and the Chinatown Discovery Festival, Bricolage, which incorporates performative elements, and Japanese in Broome, a public art project engaging with local cultural contexts.

Tomoko’s current projects extend her ongoing exploration of thread-based practice and spatial installation into more research-oriented and process-driven forms. Rather than producing singular finished works, these projects operate as open-ended systems that evolve through time, place, and shifting relationships. They investigate how material, memory, landscape, and human connection can be continuously reconfigured within changing environments.

Recently, her practice has expanded through installation and collaborative processes that engage with different cultural and regional contexts, further developing the concept of “thread” as a way to think about connection, structure, and transformation within contemporary visual art.