EMILY SCHOROWSKY
Interview with Meredith Toyama
Tenderness
Solo show featuring work by Meredith Toyama
AD Space
13-23 July, 2022
Image by Meredith Toyama
Instagram: @primerrycolour
Emily Schorowsky (ES): Okay. So to get started, why don't you tell us a little bit about your exhibition, Tenderness.
Meredith Toyama (MT): I picked that word because I felt like it encompassed so many things, it could just be about gentleness. It's with human emotions, relationships, and touch. But it also alludes to when you're hurt, your skin feels tender, the pain aspect of it. I thought it encompassed everything I wanted to talk about. I'm exploring human relationships, with myself, but also by extension other people and how I interpret them. And also looking at the smaller moments in life; I keep a gratitude journal and everyday I write something simple that I'm grateful for. So maybe I had a really good lunch that day, or one time I found a piece of glitter, and that brought me so much joy. I'm trying to focus on the little aspects that kind of go unnoticed.
ES: How would you say the exhibition fits in with your practice?
MT: My overall practice looks at mental health, such as anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder, and part of that is managing your emotions. That means a lot of talking through and thinking about why I think and behave the way I do, or sometimes I get triggered and I don't know why. So that's where my focus is now is emotions because I have a hard time understanding them. Sometimes you just need time to unpack. So I look more into the process of it, of figuring it out. And that's where most of my pieces in the exhibition came to play.
ES: You already talked a little bit about the journaling and your gratitude journal, can you describe how this is reflected in your exhibition?
MT: There's a lot of text work that I do, I think that's where it shows the most. I tend to hand pick bits where a phrase stood out to me or I'll sometimes have an affirmation that I repeat to myself, so I make sure I believe it. That's where the text element really comes in. As a very anxious person, it helps to write everything down to either unpack it or just physically put your thoughts somewhere so you don't have to have it overwhelm you.
ES: You included an interactive element in which people were able to anonymously answer some prompts on sticky notes, and then submit them to you through a box. What was your process for choosing the questions, and what are you going to do with the answers?
MT: I like writing things down, so I thought it could be helpful for other people. A technique I learned in therapy where my therapist prompted me to write everything down that worries me, then crumple it up and physically throw it away. That's where the idea came from. As someone who overthinks, ruminates and is very, very anxious all the time, the two questions, “what are you thinking about right now and what are you trying not to think about?”, stem from that.
I have a lot of friends who are going through life transitions right now. I want to encourage them to find a coping skill, which works for me. It might not work for them, but at least we tried. I tend to write a lot about things I wish I could go back and say to my younger self to kind of guide her. So that's where the third question came from, “what would you say to yourself in the past, present, and future”. I didn't want to limit it to just the past. The responses were amazing. Some of them were very dark, some of them were just cute little drawings. I thought it'd be interesting to pull from other people's words because I've just been focusing on my own words and I wanted to change it up.
ES: You told me a bit about how Tenderness is like a collection of works you've done at UNSW Art and Design, could you tell us about how your process evolved over time and how that is reflected within your exhibition.
MT: I remember in first year; I did a series of small paintings around the subject of grief expressed through water. I went to the beach, took some photos and references and painted that to convey sadness. I think the emotional bit was kind of stemming from there. In my second year, during lockdown, I used a lot of Japanese and Thai folklore and cultural elements in my works. I don't think I necessarily focused on trying to explicitly depict Japanese and Thai motifs, I feel like that's just my identity, so if it comes through, it comes through. The subject of emotions morphed into me looking at mental health, and how if you're in a different headspace, it changes how you perceive everything. For example, how you experience time and space is completely different and during dissociation you feel very detached. I was going through that as well and the lockdown was just bad for everyone. It progressed to me wanting to figure out what's going on in my brain.
In first year, I focused more on doing well in assignments and hitting all of the criteria. I was so focused on the end-product and my final projects all of the time. Then, halfway through, it evolved into me looking more into process-based artmaking. The outcome wasn't too much of a worry for me. For example, the pieces on the clothes pins was me meditating every day, for 14 days. Based on how I was feeling, or if I had an intrusive thought or a recurring thought, I would write it down. That is very much process space. I think I've changed a lot in the past four years, but there definitely have been links and themes. I haven't really felt confident or felt like my practice made sense until I saw the entire progression of it.
ES: That brings me onto what you think is in store for you. What is the future of your practice and is there anything you look forward to experimenting with?
MT: I think I'm gonna still continue exploring relationships in my art. There are so many different types of relationships. Platonic, romantic, ones that ended, ones that are running. It's just everyone goes through them and I’m really intrigued by them. I also think I'm still gonna focus on hands, although I hate hands. Anatomically speaking for me, they're a nightmare. You can't make them look right. But I started doing it because, well, I couldn't draw hands and I was really annoyed that I couldn't. That also relates to my interest in touch. Touch could be about comfort and love and it could also instill a sense of fear and, you know, urgency. You can expand so much on just this one sense. I made some handmade paper and that was really fun. I want to look more into materials and I just have a lot of paper. Old post-its that I want to cling onto, but shouldn't. It’s a way of up-cycling, which ties into process-based art .I've always been like a pastel-colored person. I just love the softness of it. The latest painting that I did with my cat and my partner has the most bold colour choices I ever made. I've been afraid of colour my entire degree and I feel like I'm finally understanding what I like to do in my practice enough to kind of venture out a little bit more.
