Polyphonic Reverb

Polyphonic Reverb
Curated by Mark Feary
Gertude Gallery. Naarm (Melbourne)

What can I offer? How can I contribute to contemporary Pacific art in an authentic and thoughtful way? I can convey a personal, emotional context – a lived experience. I am a biracial woman, disconnected from her Samoan/Chinese heritage, who migrated to Australia in 1974 from Aotearoa (New Zealand) and was brought up by my mother, of European descent.  My father was born in Samoa to a complex family of Samoan, European and Chinese heritages. I met him when I was 15.  In many ways, he was also disconnected from his Samoan culture and desired to be so. He especially valued educated upper-class British culture. His father was a Secretary-General of the South Pacific Commission. His father’s father was a young American trader who settled in Samoa in 1883 and married Fa’animonimo, a Samoan woman. His father’s mother was a Samoan-Chinese businesswoman. Her Chinese father was an indentured labourer – a slave.

In thinking about these works, I thought of the title Echo’alien. It conveys internal and external alienation, reflection, deflection, distortion, the pain of being seen not as I am, and the pain of not being seen as I am. I am one of many existing interwoven strands – a multiplicity of realities. I find myself constantly untangling, attending to each and every thread, never in a fixed position. I find myself falling into a gravitational, plummeting root system that speaks of movement and internal fissures – bodyless and unsubstantial. The artworks hint at groundlessness as they stand tall and ethereal. The skirts hide the lower body. The layers of threads connect with plant fibres and hair. The reflective and hybridised flower-like heads beam new ways of thinking and connecting to others – a new flowering.

Is the work, Echo’alien, totemic for the in-between?  The liminal space where biracial diasporic dwellers apparently hover. Maybe that’s where my tribe is? A foot in each camp, not entirely here or fully there. Which is where? For me, it’s a space of traumatic dissonance, of alienation within myself on both sides of my family, in particular, my paternal Samoan side. This is a feeling of not fitting in or belonging to any group of people or land. Groundless.  The forces of colonisation and migration affect the intergenerational disconnection on both sides of my family, contributing to my sense of landlessness and dissonance. This goes back four or five generations across Samoa, England, Scotland, Germany, the USA, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and China.

Rituals, customs and traditions are integral to a sense of belonging. The practice of art-making feeds this. Making art is making meaning. It is a personal ritual of memorialising profound human experiences. For me, the ritual of undergoing malu (female tatau) was more about the protection of a sacred site – my body – and a spiritual connection to my ancestral lineage. We are born with an ancestral imprint – it’s in our bones – it emerges on the surface when the time is right.  

Photography by Christian Cupurro