Self-portrait, 2018
Photographic series with recorded music performance/soundscape
Prints (150 cm x 100 cm x 3)
Music/sound (3 mins 5 sec): concert flute, electronic percussion
Drawing on the concept and practice of kupesi (motif), red and yellow lighting symbolise Tonga and Australia’s national flowers (red heilala and golden wattle), while the tree sprouts a hibiscus and a rose as iconic symbols that have been historically impressed upon female sexuality. In accompaniment is a sonic re-working of a common fangufangu (Tongan nose-flute) motif and Tongan drum patterns, which organically produce moments of consonance and dissonance, and blur the lines between what is ‘in’ and ‘out’ of time.
Motif, 2018
Single-channel HD video with recorded music performance/soundscape.
Video (6 mins 47 sec): 1920p x 1080p.
Music/sound (6 mins 47 sec): concert flute, electronic strings, piano and percussion, field recordings.
Motif employs Tongan principles of kupesi (motif) relating to symbolism, hoa (pairs/pairings), and cyclic time. The ocean is used as a motivic symbol for connection and separation between the Moana and the West. It is expanded into other symbols of transit and transitional physical and psychological spaces as well as motifs drawn from archival records, tourist iconography, popular culture, and American Hollywood films. These are restaged against a cinematic soundtrack, which is built upon sonic motifs.
An-Other, 2018
Mixed media installation with recorded music performance/soundscape
Mixed media installation (90.5 cm x 59.5 cm): re-printed archival photographs, glass mirror, chain, wooden frame.
Music/sound (3 mins 5 sec): concert flute.
An-Other re-assembles into one frame, 85 colonial photographs (primarily sourced from Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand collection) of Tongan, Samoan, Fijian, and Hawaiian women taken between 1880 and circa 1920s. The work employs the colonial ‘gaze’ and Tongan practice of kupesi to (re)stage navigations of gendered intersubjectivity and power.
*Copyright has been approved to the artist for all images used in this work.