Ayumu Yamada (b. 1996, Tokyo) graduated from the Department of Sculpture at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2024 and completed his MFA in Sculpture at the university’s Graduate School of Fine Arts in 2026. Working primarily with woodcarving, Yamada explores ways of giving visual form to invisible forces and presences by connecting them with bodily perception. At the core of Yamada’s practice is an understanding of the world through his own body. Drawing on everyday events and sensations, he turns his attention toward forces and presences that cannot be directly seen, exploring their relationship to the body. His perspective sometimes expands from the intimate scale of the body to the vastness of the cosmos. By bringing seemingly distant realms into relation through bodily perception, Yamada unsettles conventional notions of scale and distance, reconsidering the relationship between the self and the world. For Yamada, the body serves as a point of reference through which the invisible can be sensed and connections with the wider world can be perceived. Through the physical act of carving wood, elusive sensations and presences are transformed into sculptures with tangible mass and form. Moving between what cannot be seen and what can be physically touched, Yamada’s works quietly invite us to reconsider the boundaries of the world as we perceive it.