b. 1995
Selected works
Installation views
Press release
The title Tree for a Jungle borrows its logic from the familiar inversion of the phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees.” Where the proverb suggests a failure to grasp the whole because of an over-attention to detail, this body of work proposes that the whole, whether history, culture, diaspora, or place, is constructed through fragments. Each tree becomes a jungle; each image a world.
Presented as a suite of paintings, the exhibition operates through the tension between micro and macro scales. Large compositions anchor the installation, while smaller works punctuate the surrounding space like visual footnotes, fragments, or memories. The result is less a linear narrative than an ecology of images. Viewers move through the paintings the way one moves through a landscape, pausing, circling back, and noticing relationships between distant points. In this way, scale becomes a material in its own right, suggesting that histories, particularly those shaped by migration, trade, and colonial encounter, are rarely legible from a static vantage point.
Across the paintings, anonymous figures appear and dissolve into their environments. Some stand partially submerged in fields of colour where land, sea, and sky collapse into one another. Others rest against tropical foliage or emerge from architectural interiors. In one image, a figure pours water onto a garden, a quiet gesture that evokes cultivation and care but also the long histories of botanical transfer and plantation economies that shaped island societies. In another, a reclining body gazes toward a horizon rendered in bands of saturated colour, recalling leisure and contemplation, as well as the act of looking outward toward departure or elsewhere.
These figures are intentionally indistinct. Their anonymity resists portraiture and instead positions them as carriers of memory. They function as stand-ins for a collective presence shaped by movement across the Pacific and beyond. The Cook Islands, which serve as a primary source of imagery and recollection, appear less as a fixed geography than as a constellation of remembered experiences. There is the red glow of sunset against volcanic silhouettes, palm trees bending toward the sea, and the luminous blues of water and sky that blur spatial boundaries.
Many of the works derive from photographs, but the paintings refuse photographic clarity. Surfaces are layered and textured, colours bleed into one another, and forms appear partially erased or reassembled. This creates an atmosphere that feels both immediate and distant, as though the images have been filtered through time. Memory here does not function as documentation, but rather as reconstruction. Each painting becomes a site where recollection, imagination, and historical residue converge.
This approach connects with the idea of hauntology, the persistence of the past within the present as a kind of ghostly presence. The paintings feel inhabited by multiple temporalities at once. A palm tree or shoreline might evoke the familiar imagery of tropical idylls circulated through tourism and colonial photography, yet the figures that occupy these spaces carry the weight of contemporary diasporic experience. The works operate within a temporal collapse where past and present coexist.
Trade and colonial encounter linger quietly beneath the surfaces of these images. The Pacific has long been a site of movement involving navigators, missionaries, traders, labourers, and tourists. Each wave of arrival introduced new materials, languages, and power structures that reshaped island life. Rather than illustrating these histories directly, the paintings allow them to surface obliquely through atmosphere and symbol. The act of watering plants, the presence of cultivated gardens, and the suggestion of built structures among tropical vegetation all gesture toward the entangled systems of exchange and control that accompanied colonial expansion.
Yet the works are not defined solely by historical weight. They also hold moments of intimacy and stillness. The reclining figure beneath a canopy of leaves suggests a pause within the flow of time. The small studies of individual plants isolate botanical forms with a quiet attentiveness. These smaller works function like visual breaths within the installation. They encourage close looking, drawing the viewer into details of leaves, textures, and colour transitions. In doing so, they echo the exhibition’s central proposition that the macro is always built from the micro.
In this sense, Tree for a Jungle operates less as a collection of discrete paintings, than as a field of relations. The works speak to one another across the wall, forming networks of colour, form, and symbol. The viewer becomes a participant in this network, moving between images and assembling meaning from their intersections.
Ultimately, the exhibition reflects on how contemporary Polynesian identity is shaped through overlapping temporal and spatial layers. The islands exist simultaneously as homeland, memory, and point of departure within global diasporic networks. The paintings acknowledge this complexity without attempting to resolve it. Instead, they embrace ambiguity, allowing images to hover between recognition and abstraction.
To see a tree and imagine a jungle is to recognise the power of the fragment. Within each image lies the possibility of a larger landscape that is historical, cultural, and personal. Tree for a Jungle invites viewers to move between these scales of perception, to notice how individual moments accumulate into collective histories, and to consider how the past continues to inhabit the present like a quiet but persistent echo.
