Written by Nic Porter
Umico Niwa is about to do something to the installation. It’s already been up for three weeks, but that isn't stopping her. She’s been living above the gallery since then, close enough to hear it breathing, or at least to imagine she can. She may be leaving Portland soon, but that offers just enough time.
She heads to the hardware store down the street for egg-yellow spray paint without removing her apron. While I await her return at ILY2, I step on a tomato. The seeds spit onto the hardwood floor atop a splotch of Klein blue spray paint. The scattered tomatoes are part of the work. Niwa’s prank on the viewer, taunting: you’re part of this too.
She returns, snagging two grapefruit Spindrifts from the gallery mini fridge. It's a warm day. Dropping to the floor, she sits criss-cross and pours the paint into a weed sprayer. She laughs quietly at her own audacity, then begins deciding where the yellow should go.
The floor.
A window.
A wall near a painting.
The ceiling, if she can reach it.
She jumps. She sprays. She talks about color theory. Then her face turns serious. The paint is washable, but it still might stain the wood floors. Maybe not. She smiles again. “It’s fine.”
She’ll be gone before the gallerists know for sure.
This is one way to understand her work: as something still happening, growing, connecting, putting down roots. Maybe that's why it feels slightly impossible to summarize in clean terms. Her sculptures are made from organic materials and sharp emotions: coconuts, mushrooms, seeds, carrots, potatoes, pewter and copper plating, grief, longing, and memory. This latest work stretches across ILY2's walls, a compilation of journal entries: drawings and excerpts framed in light wood reminiscent of her childhood bedroom. Some of the entries are sealed, only to be opened after her death.
The throughline of her practice is yearning — the kind that makes your breath catch before you fully understand why. Still, Niwa keeps finding ways to let air into the room: a tomato underfoot, a seed hidden beneath floorboards, snuck across borders, a coconut father with a mushroom cell phone. The work doesn’t undercut its own ache so much as make it survivable.
Out the window, we spot a group of toddlers being led down the street, connected by a walking rope. The child at the end twists around to smile at Niwa, pulled backward for nearly a block as he holds her gaze.
Niwa’s debut exhibition at ILY2 Portland is titled the disappearance of my testicles, and other such mysteries regarding motherhood. It's also this iteration of the Portland gallery's last. One of the pieces reaches for me. Roped in circles of soft purple that vacillate between blur and sharpness, it distorts my vision, giving the sensation that I’m viewing it refracted through layers of glass, reflection, or time. A line reads:
“Before the surgery, when asked by my mother if I wanted to save my seed, to sow and reap at a later date, rather than burden this realm with another soul, I declined to do so. During the following year, I began to experience these vivid dreams of seedpods germinating, sending their tentacles down into the cool ground as they yearn upwards towards the blazing sun. These phantom sensations were subtle, distant, but mine.”
Niwa refers to her works as progeny: made by her, separate from her, but still needing tending. For a trans artist making work that moves through motherhood, fertility, surgery, and family ties, the language carries extra weight. Many of her drawings center on her niece and the rare feeling of being fully, peacefully present.
We head upstairs to the space above the gallery that has been Niwa’s home during the installation. A creative nomad, Niwa was born in Nagoya, Aichi, Japan, spent formative years in England, and has lived in the U.S. for nearly half her life. From Portland, she’ll head to Cambridge, England, where she plans to bury a calf and make a nine-month audio work. But not before she casts a few nuts in pewter and adds them to the installation here.
Throughout our conversation, Niwa returns again and again to impermanence, longing, play, grief, chance, family, silence, seeds hidden inside sculptures, and the relief of making work badly.
At the center of it all is an artist trying to process being alive in real time.
What was the origin of the Family Staircase series?
So much of my work, especially when it comes to making daphnes or the Family Staircase series, is something I need to do to simply process and operate and live life. A lot of it is based off of play therapy and also internal family systems, therapeutic framework models.
When I was visiting Brooklyn. I went into a bodega market and I picked up a coconut, and it reminded me of my dad because the little hairs on top were wispy and looked like it was balding. I took that back with me to my temporary studio because I was in a residency, and I remember standing there in the market, crying over it, and then adding body parts to it.
So much of my memories of him when I was a child and even now is always just being on his phone and being rather absent. And then I gave him chili pepper nipples, and I hung that up in my studio. Not so much as an artwork, but just because I was missing my dad and my mom and maybe also working through those aspects that I find in myself.
How did it help you work through those aspects.
Even though I resented him so much when I was growing up for never being at home and forever being absent — he’s in Russia in the morning, but then in the evening he’s maybe in Brazil, and there were stretches of time when I wouldn’t see him for many months — I’ve become that. I also travel every month and I’m also a workaholic and also hustling and grinding.
Making that piece and processing it and working through it, and then making figures of my mother as well, has really helped me understand those aspects within myself, because they are a part of me. With each passing day, I become more and more like both my mom and my dad and other figures in my life.
What happens to those organic sculptures over time?
There are a series that I carry around that I don’t display that are organic figures of my family members, including myself, where they fall apart each time I see them when I open this briefcase that I carry around. But the electroplating is a very thin veneer on the surface, and it gives it the slightest amount of stability, but they’re still incredibly fragile.
What’s more archival than a feeling or a memory or an experience, or a phantom of something, as opposed to the physical material object itself?
Every time I go back to Japan, I’m reminded of that when I see them. They become a little more frail and their hairs are grayer, and I can’t hug them as tightly. I gesture and embrace instead of truly squeezing like I used to.
With each passing year, the organic figures also become more brittle and frail. I would rather live with something that helps me come to terms with this temporal aspect of life.
What keeps drawing you back to organic materials?
There's something really fun and playful. How stressed can you possibly be if you're sticking a stick through a banana and then a carrot on the end of it and then tomatoes to make something in that messy quality?
It’s a nice reset as my career gets busier or feels more serious. I’m still just playing in my studio and getting messy.
The other aspect that I’m really fascinated with is the seeds that are often found in these organic matters. They operate as time capsules, but they also operate as this really fun, punk thing.
I get kind of a kick out of getting all of these organic matters across borders each time I ship them places. There’s something mischievous and fun and terroristic about scattering seeds across the world.
You spoke downstairs about how installation used to intimidate you, but now it feels more open. What changed?
Maybe this is a little bit morbid or macabre: years ago, I overdosed. After overdosing, I don’t really get all that stressed anymore because things don’t really matter too greatly in the grand scheme of things.
It could be the biggest show of your life. But at the end of the day, it’s still just a show. The sun will consume us, and nothing is truly archival. You make a mark, add something, it looks bad. But you make enough work, and a good chunk of it is going to be garbage. It doesn’t really matter.
Other kinds of artists or authors give themselves grace to fuck around and mess around, and I think that’s really nice. I’m trying to do the same. If I make a good work or a good show once every five shows, then I’m more than ecstatic.
How does chance come into the work?
Sometimes I joke with people during install, like, we should just Marie Curie it. Collaborating with chance, I think, is a humbling, cool kind of way of navigating stuff, and it’s less stress. It can be freestyle.
I think that’s how penicillin was discovered, leaving that window open for an act of nature, an act of chance, an act of God, to create something you’re not capable of bringing to fruition just through yourself.
Do your parents understand your work?
If they had a microphone placed in front of them, chances are absolutely not.
But I don’t think that matters, because I actually feel the same with a lot of my peers. I can’t regurgitate their artist statement verbatim, but I know the stories that they’ve told me or the lived experiences they’ve gone through. I know the gist of it or the feeling of it.
I would say that’s the case with my parents. They could talk more on a personal level of what the artworks probably mean to me, and they would be rather accurate, maybe more insightful than even me writing about my work because they have memories of me from memories I don’t have of myself.
The show feels so diaristic — almost like the private self has been opened up and framed. Did journaling always feel connected to art-making for you?
I still have so much I'm still actively working through. I still kind of feel like a middle schooler or a high schooler just scratching away into my notebook under the covers at night, like what is happening? What is going on? Why do I feel this way? Why am I so frustrated?
I’m very much still in that space. I can’t biologically have children. I don’t have savings. I’m a nomadic artist who can’t seem to hold down any romantic relationship if my life depended on it. And that is a great basis for having angst. Why can't I maintain any of these things?
The work downstairs is very upfront about wanting to be a work that comes from a place of angst. Maybe it’s a little on the nose, but it unapologetically feels like a journal entry, a diary that’s been opened up.
The color palettes in the frames are of my bedroom walls when I was growing up in my childhood home. Some of the aesthetic stuff is minimalism, color theory. These little dots of colors feel like early-2000s YouTube graphics. I’m trying to make a series of work that’s couched in that time period — late ’90s, early 2000s — but sort of remixing it.
You had vocal surgery and then had to be silent for two months. Did that change the way you made work?
It was unsuccessful and botched, but I had to be silent for two months after vocal surgery, because you’re just not capable of speaking. I did a lot of writing during that time.
It was a really bittersweet blessing to be silent for two months, but also still working and traveling and being nomadic. I'd find myself on the streets of San Francisco at night, not able to speak. The app I used to type out questions to people, I couldn’t use because my phone had died. And then I had to navigate that space, try to get people’s attention. It really makes you feel the fragile nature of existing in a body.
During that time when I was on mute for two months, someone that I had worked with and known from a summer camp took their life. And this weird feeling of not being able — not allowed — to cry.
It does something to you when you can’t cry and you can’t talk to your partner or your parents or your sisters or friends on the phone. You’re in a motel room in San Francisco because you’re installing work for a show, and it’s the show where your work is about grief and loss and sadness, and it’s these carbonized artworks.
Even before that, I was really into the practice of journaling and using writing in my work. But that experience really — the only outlet that I truly had, where I sublimated crying and talking to friends, was silently writing.
Not to sound dramatic, but I think that did kind of low-key save my life. If you don’t have that aspect in your life of making work to process things or writing, I think it comes out in other forms of drinking or doing drugs or risky behaviors.
So I wrote. What else could I do? I wrote a lot to process.
There’s a drawing in the show of you sitting in a playpen with your niece. You’ve described her as changing something in you. What does that relationship open up?
That drawing of me sitting in the playpen in Japan with my niece, in that moment, I don’t have any of those thoughts, worries or fears or desires or hopes or anxieties. I’m just truly vibing with her and hanging out and playing.
I haven’t had a healthy outlet or a healthy mode of that. All other modes of that are escapism through drugs or alcohol or dating people. But this is like, oh my God. I can’t look away, and I have to be fully engaged as she’s playing. I am not wrapped with guilt and angst and sorrow and melancholy and anger or frustration, or need for validation or awards and grants.
You lose that kind of edge. You’re grounded and present.
My niece's unexpected birth, is having this effect on my life. It’s making me reconsider a lot of things, especially as I am about to reach 35 and I don’t have a mortgage, a home, pets, children, a partner. It’s like, oh my God, I would love to have some of those things.
How does that longing come into play in your work?
Feelings of what ifs and if onlys
— that is very much front and center. Sometimes I have a feeling that at the very, very center of my practice is actually not yearning, melancholy, or sadness, but hope. It’s the desire to find an alternative model of living that isn’t constrained to what I have right now. That isn’t within simply the binaries of being nomadic and working, or having a nuclear family, male and female. There have to be pockets that you’re able to foster and carve out.
My longing is often the sadness of not occupying that space or having that space given to me. There’s a continual striving towards getting to that place of feeling comfortable in my own body and feeling comfortable with what it means to have a family or have a home without falling into the default of a mortgage and a house and having two children, a white picket fence family, and having a partner.
I don’t think that I am capable of that. I have to find some other modality.
You travel constantly, and your work seems to move through time that way too — childhood, future self, family memory, fantasy. Do you think about time as linear?
I don’t think a linear path benefits anyone. If banks show their customers altered pictures of themselves when they’re older, they’re more likely to start putting away money into their savings account. And then there’s a whole thing of healing your inner child through play therapy. To heal your inner child means to have a better future self when you’re older.
It’s all tied together, past and future and present. I don’t really see it all that linear.
What’s next after Portland?
For the rest of this year, I’ll be living in Cambridge, England. I grew up in England during middle school, so it’s a very surreal feeling to be back.
I’m going to be in search of cows and horses and foals and calves that have recently passed away to collect, to use in a project. Then I’ll be going to Italy in mid-September because I’ll be having a show at a gallery called T293 in Rome.
For the gallery in Italy, I’m going to be making some animations. For the residency in England, I’ll be working on sound art. I like working with mediums I’ve never worked with before because it’s kind of a risk, and you can fail spectacularly.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Photos 1, 2, 4-10 and 13 by Nic Porter @nicportland
Umico Niwa is on instagram @im.umico
Umico Niwa is represented by ILY2
the disappearance of my testicles, and other such mysteries regarding motherhood is on view now through July 3, 2026 at ILY2 Portland.
