TRACEY TAWHIAO

Pouika, 2020
acrylic and paint pen on wood

Tracey Tawhiao is a prolific artist with a wide range of creative expression including poetry, painting, performance and film making. She is well known for using newspaper as the basis of her practice, obscuring passages of text with block colours and maori symbols and motifs, whilst highlighting short headlines or individual words. Tawhiao’s artistic practise arose from time spent with her grandparents at their Matakana Island home. The walls were covered in newspapers and Tawhiao's idea to brighten the place up was to apply symbols and images directly to the walls. This close connection to the text highlighted to her the negativity implicit in the headlines. Tawhiao's work is informed by the experience of māori in a colonised world. She has been heavily influenced by the juxtaposition of living alongside her grandparents and their way of life on Matakana Island to the demands and 'chaos of contemporary living' outside that setting. - Wikipedia.com