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Toshiko Oiyama / FLOW

Opening night, 6 – 8 pm Thursday 5 June. The exhibition runs until 5 pm Sunday 22 June. Curated by James Gardiner.

Not Drowning, Flowing

Essay by Lisa Sharp

FLOW, the title carefully and consciously chosen by artist Toshiko Oiyama for this solo exhibition implies a condition of ambiguity. To flow, or to be in a flow, is to be in motion between one thing and another. Flow is a state that creeps, envelops, and is allegorical of a constant slippage and erosion of boundaries. Arguably, in contemporary art this signals a species of expanded vanitas, a reflection on a universality beyond that of any singular life cycle. As a direct visual language, Oiyama’s method of practice and works reflect a preoccupation of the artist – drawing with ink in a sustained dialogue with transience –materially as well as conceptually. Her medium may be ink on paper, but in a series of inventive interventions she positions the resulting artwork as questions, the answers to which are, change. If art is on its way to becoming something else, does this not echo the incessant and unending journey of all physicality? Our experiences of transient states are as varied as a buried memory resurfacing briefly, or as prolonged as our abstract knowledge of a star forming somewhere. It is a posture that seems to subtly point to the futility of exterior worldly pursuits while emphasising the primacy of the interior, experienced moment. And, as she points out, as a word, FLOW is ambiguous, acting as both verb and noun, it both does and identifies.

“For me, drawing is a way of asking questions that cannot be answered in words”

Toshiko Oiyama

Oiyama draws primarily with black, white, sepia, silver and gold ink on paper. Her drawing practice extends off the paper, into an investigation of marks and of paper itself, playfully pitting the potential for a drawing to activate space around it. To this end, she uses chance against purpose, accident against planning. On a base of organic ink blooms, a deliberate grid appears, partly revealed and suggesting a larger scheme. Lines turn and punch through the paper, reappearing as threads which end in random and kinetic splays. In the studio the neat white rectangle of a new sheet of paper is not at all sacrosanct as it gradually fills with ink flows and guided marks. The structure of the sheet is ruptured over and again with needle punctures and stitches. The sheet is also folded, sliced, and held in curves by magnets and pins.

Where I might characterise this as a tussle with materials, Oiyama sees her actions as a respectful collaboration. While the material ingredients are simple and the drawn actions elemental, the point of this material restraint is to grow familiarity and intimacy, enabling rehearsals, repetitions and process-based seriality to emerge. There are not only many ways of putting ink on paper, but also forms ink and paper can take. Within this way of working, quietly, in muted monochrome, in a dance of collaboration with matter, gentle interrogations occur and recur.

Ink, of course, is a pigmented liquid and so it flows and runs, its dilution governing degrees of viscosity and darkness. Ink separates and activates into tones as it mixes with water, halting inexorably at the point it is pulled into full absorption by paper. The papers Oiyama selects for use tend to be resilient, heavyweight cotton rags and oil papers. Working on the floor, paper can be laid in all directions for staining with successive washes of ink, creating blooms and flows in a barely controlled process (as anyone who works with ink will know, the beauty of an ink drawing is often found in passages where intervention is minimal). While much of the ink flow processes are left to chance, there is a subsequent search and selection of marks and to this end, both sides of the paper are used, recycling the drawings.

Once dried, ink marks are set against geometries; the grid appears, and in an expansion of drawing from the space of the studio into the space of the gallery. Oiyama’s drawn interventions-as-marks transcend the rectilinearity of white paper and emerge into the white cube of gallery presentation. Over the turbulent ink, hand drawn ink curls and grid lines appear and disappear among the waves and washes of DRIFT, a multi-panelled work. The FLOW works also feature layered overdrawing; a grid that is systematically sewn through the paper like upholstery. Tufted thread ends are left protruding, resembling calligraphic statements of intent. In FALL, paper is sliced precisely into linear projecting loops that hang in space. Positioned vertically the loops seem to gesture, suggest a gentle downward motion. For SCOOP, dots of black ink were applied undiluted (using disposable chopsticks as a tool) before the paper, bent and folded into a new curved form, much like a vessel, is held in place with magnets. TURN features sheets of paper turned up on themselves, exposing their verso and making use of map pins to conceal as well as to display. All these works are drawings, yes, in that the artist has assembled lines, colour, texture and tone but rather than presenting that interplay on a mere 2dimensional plane of paper placed flat against a wall, these drawings play, question and muse. If ink on paper could gesture, hold and beckon to the space around, back and front, this is the dance of drawing as it flows outside the square. As the artist herself says, laughingly, as we looked at FALL together, its curious cut loops bouncing languidly from it, “this drawing is dancing with shadows”.

In her past, Oiyama has also had a career as a graphic designer. When asked about her influences, the answers are somewhat surprising. Rather than other artists or drawers, Oiyama initially nominates an architect, a fashion designer, a physicist and a 16th century Japanese artist. Tension, structure, understanding, grace. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (1936) remains an ever-tensioned union of structure and nature, a calculation of building, not falling, into a waterfall. Issey Miyake, for tracing the qualities of line as pleats in fabric, an architectural envisioning of a flexible, plastic material as a foldable plane. Alan Lightman, a physicist thinking and writing at the intersection of science and poetry is important for Oiyama for his revelations about our position in the universe. More personally, the work of Tawaraya Sōtatsu provides a historical-cultural touchstone. During my studio visit, Oiyama shows a rolled reproduction of a favourite Sōtatsu work, Scroll of poems with the plants of four seasons. She stands in her studio and unfurls the scroll. What is pervasive in seeing the work this way, is the rolling out of material space simultaneous with the unrolling of negative space, held in a handsbreadth.

Toshiko and I talk about how the idea of flow, her conception of transience, and mine of contemporary vanitas could be discerned in art. We debate the light and shade of it. For artists have long depicted transience, but even so, there is a scale to transience. It could be held in a single dazzling second, a season of blossom, a single life passing, or at massive galactic scale. If we stood in the Dutch Golden Age, we would read imagery suffused with the symbolism of skulls, soon-totarnish silver, impossible bouquets and partly peeled lemons as a directive to attend to matters of the soul in this one fleeting life. Elsewhere, in Eastern traditions of ink drawing and calligraphy temporality is told through another set of symbols. Where seasons cycle and blossoms, peaches, and turtles float in a suspense of negative space, a prolonged moment of veneration for the blessing of longevity. All things are mutable and impermanent. While the words vanitas (Latin) and mu (Japanese) both signify emptiness, or nothingness, they do not mean the same thing. We discern the light and shade of it.

Toshiko Oiyama’s FLOW drawings are contemporary abstractions so rather than readable symbolism or overt imagery we have the works themselves, the ink on paper, the processes they reveal, and of course the artist’s conception and dialogue as guide. It is a practice of invoking transience with a material touch. In her handsbreadth, ink is the flow, and paper the inkcourse.