MAUKA

Commissioned For Mauna Lani Resort
Size: 40’ x 60’
Medium: Wall Mural
2016

Mauka, the mural created for the Mauna Lani Resort on Hawai‘i Island’s Kona Coast, reflects the deep environmental and cultural relationship that Native Hawaiians have long maintained with the mauka—or upland—regions of the islands. This artwork honors the ancestral knowledge that guided sustainable practices and ensured balance between people and the land. Through layered symbolism and visual storytelling, the mural speaks to the sacred interdependence between upland forests, watersheds, and coastal life, reminding us of the enduring wisdom embedded in Native Hawaiian ways of living with the land.

THE PROCESS

Mauka is a visual journey toward the uplands—a movement inland, toward source, sanctuary, and ancestral grounding. In this work, Herman Piʻikea Clark explores the symbolic and spatial meanings of mauka within a Kanaka Maoli worldview, where the mountain regions are not only geographical markers but spiritual reservoirs of knowledge, life, and identity. Created through layered abstraction and a restrained palette, Mauka builds a sense of quiet elevation. Contoured forms and rhythmic linework echo the movement of streams, ridgelines, and wind currents—suggesting the pathways by which ʻike travels from mountain to shore. The composition invites viewers to consider what it means to return mauka: to ascend inward, to reconnect with origin, to be nourished by the unseen. Through this work, Clark continues his commitment to Indigenous abstraction as a mode of visual storytelling—where place, lineage, and form are inseparable.

INSTALLATION LOCATION AND DETAILS

Mauna Lani Resort, Auberge Resort Collection, Kona Coast, Hawaii

(NEED NEW COPY) This series was first exhibited in ‘Ai Pōhaku: Stone Eaters at the University of Hawaii. It was later acquired by the State of Hawai‘i, Foundation on Culture and the Arts, and is now on public display at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs in Honolulu, Hawai‘i.