Yuria Okamura is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice encompasses drawing, painting and installation.
Her work conflates botanical images and geometric forms inspired by religious symbolism, architecture and decoration from across cultures and spiritualist abstract paintings. Through this combination, Yuria explores the similarities between patterns found in nature and symbolic forms used in various religious traditions and metaphysical imaginings. In doing so, she examines how the symbolic potential of geometry might be harnessed to evoke spiritual interpretations of the natural world.

Yuria’s work embodies her affinity with animism, partly informed by Buddhist and Shinto worldviews from growing up in Japan, and her interest in the universality of geometric and botanical imageries. Yuria also employs wall drawings inspired by religious architecture in an attempt to emulate the immersive and meditative quality of sacred spaces.

Presenting works on paper that combine geometric and botanical images within spatial wall drawings, she metaphorically enshrines nature within imagined architecture. In this way, her work envisions garden-like contemplative spaces where nature and culture, and the physical and metaphysical worlds come together. 

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