The seas we know so well, 2024

The seas we know so well is a site-specific installation that explores notions of memory, familial histories and how one connects to culture. 

Utilising family video footage taken from our first ever family trip to the Cook Islands in 2001, I have selected abstract moments of our time there: The inside of my family homestead, a dancer performing, my mother walking, the landscape. My father has taken most of the footage with a few sections where a 15-year old version of me takes over. 

What draws me back to this footage is remembering how I felt. It was hot and I was itchy, I had been sunburned badly and I think I expected a revelatory moment to happen when I finally touched down on ancestral homelands. The weight of expectations was huge. Now, looking at this footage 20+ years later, I feel less disconnected and less awkward about claiming this home as somewhere I belong. 

In Samoan culture there is a concept called the va – the space between, a space in which separate times, relationships, things, and entities are held outside of Westernised constructs. This space may be intangible but through the half built wall structure and the snippets of a time from my past I create explorations into what it would look like if it was actually tangible. 

Never wanting to present a conclusion but rather another part to an ongoing story, The seas we know so well explores an ebb and flow of connection, culture and time and the way that the past becomes the present and also the future.

Part of the 2024 Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) exhibited at Artspace Sydney