AKUA STUDIES
Size: 11” X 14”
Medium: Ink, Graphite and Color Pencil
2024
Akua Studies is an ongoing series of abstract sketch works that explore visual language through a Kanaka Maoli lens. Rooted in the practice of Indigenous abstraction, these studies investigate the interplay of shape, texture, color, contrast, and emphasis—not as purely formal concerns, but as pathways to cultural meaning.
Each sketch serves as both inquiry and offering. Through these works, I examine how visual elements can carry the presence of akua—divine forces and ancestral intelligences—and how contemporary forms can give voice to traditional knowledge systems. Rather than depict figures directly, these studies gesture toward the unseen: the rhythms of ceremony, the contours of land, the echoes of ancestral breath.
The Akua Studies form the foundation for larger works in painting, print, and mural. They are part of a broader effort to translate Indigenous ways of knowing into visual concepts that resonate across time and context.
THE PROCESS
The Akua Studies emerge through an iterative process of visual exploration — working across graphite, woodcut printing, paint, and mixed materials. These are not preliminary sketches in the conventional sense; they are visual thinking, where ideas are formed, tested, and transformed through making.
Each study builds on the last. Line, shape, and repetition become carriers of ancestral knowledge — holding the pulse of akua, the imprint of place, and the rhythm of cultural memory.
The materials themselves are collaborators. Graphite offers nuance and control; woodcut introduces resistance and tactility; layered paint and print reveal hidden relationships between surface and meaning. Making becomes translation — an Indigenous visual language taking shape, one mark at a time.
