Lehuauakea
Tribe: Kanaka Maoli
Based In: Portland, OR / Hawaiʻi
Email: lehuauakea@gmail.com
Social Media: @_lehuauakea_
Website: lehuauakea.com
About the Art
I am a being — a consciousness within living flesh, blood, and bone.
I am a body — striving for equilibrium in my environment.
I am human — and walk with ancestors who gave me lungs to breathe and hands to create.
I consider my current body of work to be an ongoing journey, a cycle, an ever-expanding spiral of reciprocal give and take. Through large-scale sculpture, hybrid installation, traditional canvas painting, and Native Hawaiian ‘ohe kāpala craft, I aim to address complex subjects of mixed identity and cultural erasure, Indigenous resilience, and ecological decline through a contemporary Hawaiian lens.
In my childhood, I learned from my kūpuna that we all came into being through darkness or pō, birthed from the depths of pōuliuli, formed by the joining of chaos and saltwater. In this time of darkness, was life, as the sea breathed life into all that we know in our universe today. In this time of darkness, too, was death, as it would soon give way to the light of ao and bring an end to the blackest night.
When I look around me, I see many things in chaos, disintegrating, splintering. I cry, and I hear the mountains, the ‘āina, our people crying too, and can’t help but wonder if the cycle is repeating and the rich union of pō and saltwater has returned. This time, what will the night give way to?
About the Artist
Lehuauakea is a māhū mixed-Native Hawaiian interdisciplinary artist and kapa maker from Pāpaʻikou on Moku O Keawe, the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. Lehua’s Kānaka Maoli family descends from several lineages connected to Maui, Kauaʻi, Kohala, and Hāmākua where their family resides to this day.
They have participated in several solo and group shows around the Pacific Ocean. Most recently these include ‘A Gift, A Breath’ at Alice Gallery in Seattle, ‘Until We Meet Again’ at Blackfish Gallery in Portland, and ‘He Hae Hōʻailona Ia’ at Aupuni Space in Honolulu. They also served as primary researcher and co-curator for the current exhibition, DISplace, at the Five Oaks Museum.
Through a range of craft-based media, their art serves as a means of exploring cultural and biological ecologies, spectrums of Indigeneity, and what it means to live within the context of contemporary environmental degradation. With a particular focus on the labor-intensive making of ʻohe kāpala, kapa cloth, and natural pigments, Lehua is able to breathe new life into patterns and traditions practiced for generations. Through these acts of resilience that help forge deeper relationships with ʻāina, this mode of Indigenous storytelling is carried well into the future.
The artist is currently based between Portland and Pāpaʻikou after earning their Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting with a minor in Art + Ecology at Pacific Northwest College of Art.
