Nelson-based artist Lee-Ann Toyokawa holds a Visual Arts Diploma and a Visual Arts Degree  from Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology. For the past 13 years she has balanced her art practice around having and raising four children.

While Lee-Ann’s art practice has evolved over time, enduring themes around her relationship to motherhood and domesticity, identity and memory remain at the forefront of her work.

“My late mother’s china cabinet was full of treasures she had collected throughout her life all having her special memories attached to them. Sadly, when I go to the recycle centres and garage sales I see hundreds of these same treasures that have been discarded. I collect and use these treasures in my art, breathing new life into these once loved objects. I think about the memories that might have been attached to each object.”

Working predominantly with oils, Lee-Ann’s detailed and compelling imagery is often painted directly onto repurposed metal trays. Images representing domesticity, a sense of nurture, and memory are repeatedly used, crockery, cutlery interspersed with native birds, insects and the occasional delicate skull, preserving in paint imagined moments and the passing of time.