Photography Graphic Design New Media
Kahua o Mali’o, a place of comfort, is one of the most important things we create for ourselves, our family and our friends. It is that warmth of heart and welcome attitude that I miss most about my home. As I reconcile with my social experiences on the Mainland I am struck by the constant reminder of how much I miss not just the place I call home, but the culture that makes that place so special to me. I moved to the mainland at the age of 18, and I remember stuttering my way through the east coast sense of hospitality, awkwardly inviting myself to visit a friend by dropping by, only to get a look of dismay when they opened the door. “Did you say you were coming over?” they’d ask, “no, I was just in the neighborhood” I would say. It was clear that this was not an accepted social practice.
Did you know your neighbors when you were growing up? I did. I would walk across the street and visit whenever they were home. We would hang out on the living room floor or sit on the couch and tell stories (though I think we spent most of our time outside). As I got older the couch became a real place of cultural comfort. A place to sit and talk about art and life. If the couch wasn’t comfortable, it showed in the conversation, shifting from one position to another, physical comfort permeates our very existence, not just our tactile senses. When I think about the word home I think of two spaces, the kitchen and the living room. These two spaces are, after all, the milieu of our domestic life. When I think of fabric, my mind fills with petroglyphs and tapa patterns, bark cloth, raw silk and linen.
I started the pattern for this piece by creating an india ink painting paying special attention to how the forms interacted with each other the way hawaiian floral prints sometimes do. I thought about Keith Haring, and even Chuck Close’s more recent works. It was important that it reflect my interest in the body and its relationship to this ubiquitous domestic object. It needed to be organic in form yet at the same time challenge my understanding of Hawaiiana. I invite my viewers to interact, inquire and most importantly reflect on how this piece affects the body. I hand screened the fabric during my 2008 summer internship at the Fabric Workshop Museum in Philadelphia under the guidance of Lonnie Graham.
My work addresses history, nostalgia and empathy through the use of photography and design. Domestic space is a dominant feature of my work and capturing the human condition as ephemera, “fixing it in eternity” as Henry Cartier-Bresson remarked. Shifting from photographing domesticity to creating an object of domesticity has caused me to reflect on my personal history and the ways in which ethnographic observation can be be a catalyst for self study in the arts.