Tapestry
Lehuauakea
“The pieces in my collaboration are all very different but they all work together. ‘Tapestry’ is based off of an artwork that I did a few years ago, ‘Tools’ is a snapshot of some of my beater tools, and the third, ‘Kite,’ is a diagram and image of one of the traditional kites that I recreated a few years ago. They may all look a bit dispersed but the tools and tool design were used to make the Kapa in the kite pieces. You’ll see a lot of pattern overlap with not only the pattern on my beaters but also the patterns I use on both ‘Kite’ and ’Tapestry’. There’s a lot of interchange happening between the three designs and their angles: It’s a contemporary artwork for one, a functional utilitarian for another, and the tools that help make both of them for the third.”
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Lehuauakea is a Native Hawaiian (Kanaka ʻŌiwi) interdisciplinary artist and barkcloth-maker who works with ancestral organic materials in contemporary ways to highlight narratives of Indigenous environmental stewardship, an evolving Kanaka ʻŌiwi identity, and the teachings held in cultural mythologies and cosmologies. By building a personal relationship with traditional techniques and materiality, Lehuauakea breathes new life into pattern symbolism used for generations and preserves cultural memory rooted in place-based practices. Grounded by ancestral modality while advancing the medium to unconventional, innovative, and tactile forms, including hand-stitched mixed-media textiles, large-scale installation, and paintings on kapa, Lehuauakea builds on these cultural knowledge systems, ensuring the perpetuation of these modes of Indigenous storytelling.
Since 2018, Lehuauakea has apprenticed under well-known barkcloth maker Wesley Sen, who trained in barkcloth-making alongside practitioners including Puanani Van Dorpe, Beatrice Krauss, Malia Solomon, Carla Freitas, Dennis Kanaʻe, and Mary Pritchard.
Lehuauakea’s work has been shown internationally, and is held in many prominent collections around the globe, including the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Portland Art Museum, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Forge Project, and Museum of International Folk Art, amongst others. The artist is currently based between Santa Fe (NM) and Pāpaʻikou (HI) after earning their Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting with a minor in Art + Ecology at Pacific Northwest College of Art.