About The Artist

Tomo Ueda was born in 1982 in a town on the banks of Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture. After graduating with a degree in Illustration from Kyoto Saga University of Arts, she went almost five years without creative output, but on her 28th birthday, at Takehiko Inoue’s renowned event “The LAST Manga Exhibition,” she had an inspirational encounter with a technique known as Japanese marbling and was instantly motivated to teach herself how. Based in Kyoto, Ueda is active at both the local and global level in the arts community. She staged her first solo show in 2013, and has participated in group exhibitions in Tokyo, NYC, LA and Australia. Her creations draw influence from music, the aromas of the changing seasons, the natural world, and outer space. These are the forces that inspire her creative process and pervade her works of art, all of which center around the greater themes of “living” and the “life force.” Ueda takes great care to establish an emotional connection in each of her works, relying in part on the highly individualistic nature of her style of marbling, which varies in character depending on the season and the temperature, thus granting nature a voice in everything she produces. Her art provides a link to the latent visions inside each viewer’s memory. Abstract patterns are more than just designs; they commune with the landscapes of memory that surface in our minds. At some point our most precious memories and the details of the great events of our lives begin to fade. Tomo Ueda’s artwork holds the power to resuscitate the priceless energy seemingly lost once these memories begin to disappear. http://www.tomo-ueda.com/