Surely the ancestors played a part in this show. There was an inevitability about the works of emerging artists and sisters Alison Leauanae and Linda Va‘aelua, both of Sāmoan, Scottish and English heritage, in Kindred at Bergman Gallery. The exhibition displays work produced over the last two years, portraying an obvious and proud connection to the Pacific and to the United Kingdom. Both in Leauanae’s hand-stitched cotton-thread works on paper, and Va‘aelua’s acrylic paint and stitched-wool compositions on hessian, Scottish and English iconography is overlaid (made kindred) with Sāmoan patterns—or the inverse, depending on your worldview.
Leauanae and Va‘aelua, each part of the Sāmoan diaspora, are producing work that evolves through the distinctive styles and stories of their hybrid cultural heritage. Leauanae’s ‘Pasese – Echoes of Home’ series (2023) is a reference to the analogue era when bus drivers issued paper tickets and used a shiny hand-held hole punch to track journeys, producing a unique shape once the ticket was clipped. Leauanae has a strong archival sensibility and has amassed a sizeable collection of these bus tickets with their varied hole-punched shapes. Cleverly, she has developed these objects— once simply proof of purchase, for when the bus inspector hopped aboard; he whose very presence would immediately improve your posture—to investigate the notion of the commute. Expanding this phenomenon, Leauanae takes the viewer on a global journey. These shapes have become symbols, representative of the most universal of all stories—migration. In Pasese – Echoes of Home (2023), the thistle flower (Scotland’s national flower) pays homage to the artist’s Scottish heritage and the arrival of her great-grandparents at Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington Harbour in Aotearoa.
Leauanae assigned each shape a letter, developing these symbols into a cryptic alpha-numeric code depicting the migrant experience. Following the exhilaration of one’s physical journey over land and sea comes the encounter of a multitude of barriers, the reality and, for some, the ongoing battle to make a home in foreign surroundings.
For the full-time Te Whanganui-a-Tara-based artist, formerly an organisational development and business management consultant, the pivot to follow her artistic passions appears to be paying off. Leauanae’s patience and dexterity bring her concepts to fruition; the labour-intensive task of sewing each carefully appointed stitch into paper, shaping symbols, articulates a clear voice, and the repetitious and time-consuming nature of her medium is perhaps a reminder of Leauanae’s own protracted journey.
Va‘aelua, in contrast, presents a body of work that speaks to her design background. A successful art director and trained graphic designer, Va‘aelua has stepped beyond the client’s vision, developing a body of work that explores the ambiguities of heritage and identity.
Abstract mauga, mountains, and malu patterns, a kind of tatau, or tattoo, are painted on hessian sacks. Va‘aelua is the navigator, retracing the riches of story through an amalgamation of signifiers. These speak to a practice steeped in culture and identity, that of her mixed Sāmoan and Scottish lineage. In Chapter 1 (2023) hand-dyed hessian is a contemporary take on the traditional use of siapo, tapa cloth, with great effect. Va‘aelua’s choice of material, discarded coffee sacks, instantly conveys the journey of the Sāmoan diaspora to her contemporary Aotearoa setting. In this reimagining of royal banner or flag, a familiar signifier of Scotland, in place of lion rampant, unicorns and thistles are depictions more closely associated with the Pacific. Mauga and semi-circle designs—mountains and the sun—take centre place in Va‘aelua’s banner, revealing her connections and experience.
Va‘aelua’s works present the many permutations and constellations of a shared and overlaid heritage. Chapter 1 (2023) locates the artist across both hemispheres, reimagining both flag and siapo forms with depictions of mauga and semi-circles. Va‘aelua’s works have a unique accent; seeing them is like being thousands of miles away from Aotearoa in the Northern Hemisphere and hearing the Kiwi twang, and with it experiencing the comfort of the familiar in a foreign setting.
Benny Chan, curator at Bergman, recalls the moment when he first contacted the artists about working together. He had messaged them both, separately, but around the same time, not realising they were sisters. They received the messages while together and, in Chan’s account, “when they discovered we didn’t know they were sisters, there was a lot of laughter.”
Kindred is a record of being connected and separated by 15,000 kilometres, the distance from Sāmoa to Scotland, and a reminder of the many serendipitous moments that global migration instils. The artists’ Scottish ancestors arrived in Aotearoa in the 1800s, and it would be more than a century before their Sāmoan forebears also journeyed south, the groundwork finally complete for the works’ emergence and for the show to come together.
In many ways, Kindred became a retrospective of these moments. How else can the journey of culture and heritage be captured? It demands piercing the crust, plumbing the depths, and exploring the layers where roots have been laid and overlaid. These new voices show that they are not afraid to dig deep.
