“Grounded” (2022) Print

Grounded, Flux + Faith (2022) was a series that artist, Vasemaca (Ema) Tavola, produced during the 2021 lockdowns to pay homage to the design and practice of tarot card reading. She says, “I used tarot cards a lot during the pandemic. They’ve felt like a way to calm the chaos in this climate of constant crisis. Reading my cards has felt like an anchor in rough seas, holding me down, to something. I love the symbolism in each card, the storied codes of these assembled visual narratives. In my readings, I go inwards, and start to see pathways and clarity.”

The series was realised originally in the form of digitally printed polar fleece blankets as a symbol of comfort, of security, or being wrapped momentarily in the known.

The suite of three works represent a past-present-future tarot spread and responded to significant changes that upturned the artist’s life, practice, business and family in 2021.

The series was later shown as fine art prints in Moonwalkerz curated by Nigel Borell for Taste of Pasifika Festival. This exhibition print is an edition of 1, produced using archival inks on Hahnemühle FineArt Metallic 340gsm and block mounted at ArtMount & Framing Matters (Auckland) in May 2022.

The building in this work is the site of Vunilagi Vou 2.0, the garage of Tavola’s family home which was sold in 2021. The secala / kōtare (sacred kingfisher) is Tavola’s totem bird, a watchful guardian, and the map seen at the top and bottom of the work is of South Auckland.

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.