ALA NIHO
Size: 10” x 10” x 1”
Medium: Monoprint series of 10 - Paper - mounted on birch ply board
2021
Ala niho — path of the tooth — references the patterned edges of traditional shark tooth weapons and the deeper cultural meanings carried within Hawaiian knowledge systems. The niho becomes a visual metaphor: a repeating edge that marks lineage, resilience, and continuity.
Each print explores rhythm through subtle variation. The monoprint process allows small shifts in texture, pressure, and tone — no two works exactly the same — echoing the layered nature of cultural memory: shared, repeated, and carried forward, yet always shaped by individual experience.
Mounted on natural birch plywood, the works invite tactile as well as visual awareness. Wood, grain, and surface become part of the reading — reinforcing that knowledge is not only seen, but physical and felt.
Taken together, Ala Niho forms a conceptual and material pathway — tracing inherited strength and reminding us that ancestral design continues to shape contemporary practice, quietly and with purpose.
Artist’s collection
THE PROCESS
Built through layered painting, printmaking, and symbolic abstraction, sealed finally in wax. The title — tooth-like paths, ancestral ridgelines — anchors the work in Kanaka Maoli understandings of lineage, movement, and encoded knowledge.
Repeated forms, glyphs, and geometric structures invoke both traditional patterns and speculative Indigenous futures — layered through print-based techniques and gestural marks to suggest maps, chants, and the spatial memory of land and kinship.
The final wax sealing is both material and metaphorical — preserving the layered marks beneath while softening the surface with a translucent veil. Protection, permanence, and sacred containment: the notion that knowledge can be held, concealed, or revealed across time.
Through ʻAla Niho, process becomes ceremony. Surface becomes a vessel for ancestral presence.
