Life.Death.Soul Painting

Tomomi Maruyama is a Japan-based artist whose practice moves fluidly across visual art, film, and spatial thinking. Born in Gunma, Japan, she began her creative career in graphic design before expanding into filmmaking, photography, and fine art. Rather than treating these disciplines as separate fields, she approaches them as interconnected methods for examining how meaning emerges through form, arrangement, and time. Her interest in moving images began during her school years, when she created a stop-motion, single-frame, hand-painted animation on 16mm film. This early experience led her to study at the London Film School in Covent Garden, where she engaged with filmmakers from diverse cultural backgrounds and developed a sensitivity to narrative structures beyond linear storytelling. Throughout her career, Maruyama has contributed to independent projects across media, including an animated documentary for the BBC. Her art-directed works have screened at international film festivals, while her visual art practice has encompassed drawing, illustration, kirie (paper cut-out art), painting, and installation. Her first solo exhibition in 2003, held at a gallery near Holland Park in London, reflected this cross-disciplinary approach. In recent years, her work has shifted away from expressive storytelling toward a quieter investigation of what remains after meaning, intention, or narrative coherence begins to dissolve. Rather than depicting emotions or messages, Maruyama is interested in gestures, spatial relationships, and traces of time—how actions, rituals, and forms continue to exist even when their original purposes are no longer clear. Recurring motifs such as animals, aging bodies, and mythological references appear not as symbols to be decoded, but as elements placed within shared spaces where distinctions between human, non-human, sacred, and ordinary begin to blur. Her practice resists definitive interpretation, inviting viewers to encounter works as provisional configurations rather than statements with fixed conclusions. Maruyama’s work has been recognized internationally, including selection as “Undiscovered Talent” from over 5,000 submissions by a prominent Japanese television presenter in 2020, as well as editorial recognition and sales distinctions on contemporary art platforms.