Haupapa (female)

Haupapa (female)

Filipe Tohi’s practice charts a line between his traditional Tongan art and craft heritage, symbolic abstraction and contemporary minimalism. Tohi, who has had a long association with Taranaki, works with sculpture, stone carving, drawing and process-based installation. To create Haupapa (female), Tohi carefully stacked slats of custom wood in the manner of traditional Tongan rope lashing to create a three-dimensional interlocking curved shape.

The sculpture is an interpretation of the Tongan practice of lalava, meaning ‘intersecting lines’. ‘Lalava’ refers to the entwining of coconut fibre in the production of rope, or the rope that lashes together timber in houses or canoes. Aesthetically, lalava describes the play of lines in the production of art. Tohi describes lalava as the ‘intersection of two strings as they spiral up and down, forming patterns. Without both strings there are no patterns and both must go together’. By expanding models of lalava designs into three-dimensional patterns, Tohi opens them to multiple viewpoints revealing the geometric nature of the patterns inherent in this traditional, formal sculptural system.

Haupapa (female) was first exhibited at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2002 in Filipe Tohi’s solo exhibition Genealogy of lines Hohoko ē tohitohi.