Andy Leleisi'uao: Empowered Wallflower

"Over the Christmas holidays, spending time with both my children and my parents I had the opportunity to watch them interact. My mother, following her daily life pattern, would get up every morning and following the same routine, as numerous other Pacific Island women do, would take up her salu and sweep the porch and driveway.

Whitespace 12 Crummer Rd, Ponsonby
March 25- April 15, 2006 Andy Leleisi'uao: Empowered Wallflower

"Over the Christmas holidays, spending time with both my children and my parents I had the opportunity to watch them interact. My mother, following her daily life pattern, would get up every morning and following the same routine, as numerous other Pacific Island women do, would take up her salu and sweep the porch and driveway.

Whitespace 12 Crummer Rd, Ponsonby
March 25- April 15, 2006Frequently she would get her granddaughter, my young daughter, to help her.

Watching this domestic ritual I was struck by the fact that my daughter, whilst capable with a European broom was beside my mother clumsy in her attempts with a salu.
While we concentrate on the obvious when we speak of culture and cultural loss, mainly language and the arts, the smaller domestic losses are equally as important as it is these acts that place us totally and completely at home, because culture is a daily experience, it is the way you live your life, and even when there is loss of language there are other many and varied ways of being at home in your culture."

Whilst overall all the paintings appear vibrant, colourful and alive on closer inspection the girls' vulnerability is apparent but so is a certain implacability, a resolution to hold onto these cultural anchors of their grandmothers. A defiance against the world to pigeon-hole as having lost their culture or indeed to pigeon-hole in anyway as yet. But also apparent is the fragility of the shoulders required to carry this burden of a changing culture, of these maidens caught in a duality of cultural upbringing - pulled by both heart and head.

Andy Leleisi'uao graduated with an MFA from AUT in 2002, in this series of new paintings he comments on the next generations ability to hold fast to Fa'a Samoa.

Whitespace
12 Crummer Rd
Ponsonby
Auckland
09 361 6331