Description
Acrylic paint on 14oz canvas, unstretched + unframed, 1200x1500mm.
Two 10mm brass-plated grommets in top corners for hanging.
Signed on the back.
“Backbone” (2023) by Vasemaca Tavola
$650
One of two large-scale paintings produced for artist Vasemaca (Ema) Tavola’s third solo exhibition, Backbone presented at Vunilagi Vou in April-May 2023.
The work produced for Backbone was informed by what is commonly known as Lapita Pottery, a ceramic tradition that maps human migration and settlement across the Oceania region from as early as 1500 BCE. In this painted study, the central form is a silhouette of an imagined, fully-formed ceramic vessel from the Lapita era rendered in a palette of pink and purple hues. The surrounding linear marks reference the dots and dashes found commonly in the decorative patterning of Lapita era ceramics, and the outlines of spinal vertebra.
Through her visual research in Backbone, Tavola started to see the markings of Lapita era ceramics as the DNA for not only visual culture, motifs and forms still used in contemporary Oceania, but as a new timeline of indigenous knowledge and resilience that re-contextualises the timeframe and cultural impact of European colonialism in the region.
Tavola’s work imagines the endurance of indigenous knowledge and visual culture as an embodied practice, the connection to this ‘source’ of knowing as the backbone that supports all function.
The two large-scale paintings on loose canvas produced for Backbone paid homage to Tavola’s beginnings as a painter at Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji in 2001.
Vasemaca (Ema) Tavola (b.1982) is a Fijian-Pākehā artist currently based in South Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Having established her painting practice in Suva, Fiji at the Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific, Tavola went on to study Sculpture at Manukau School of Visual Arts and later Arts Management at AUT University.
In 2019, she established an independent gallery and consultancy called Vunilagi Vou which continues to shapeshift in the pandemic climate. Whilst curating is an external, social practice for Tavola, artmaking and painting particularly is Tavola’s internal process of intellectual enquiry and creative meditation.
Recent exhibitions include Volume: Bodies of Knowlege by Community Reading Room curated by Dr Torika Bolatagici, Metro Arts, Queensland & Counihan Gallery, Naarm, Australia (2022/23), Moonwalkerz curated by Nigel Borell, Taste of Pasifika Festival, Auckland (2022) and Hidden in Plain Sight. From Being Rendered Invisible to Becoming Visible curated by Julia Albrecht and Stephanie Endter, Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt, Germany (2021). Tavola has work in private and public collections including Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Art Gallery and Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand and in 2024 will present her fourth solo exhibition, To Live + Die in South Auckland at Fresh Gallery Ōtara.
