Since she was a young girl, Angela Tiatia wanted to be an artist. Her mother, however, wanted her to work in an office.
Tiatia’s mother moved from Samoa to Aotearoa New Zealand for work in the 1960s, a time when employment options for Pasifika migrants was limited to factory work or manual labour. “My mother was a factory worker and worked tirelessly to provide for me and my two sisters,” Tiatia says.
Tiatia understands why her mother discouraged her from following her creative instincts. “She didn’t want her daughters to have to struggle the way she had, so strongly encouraged me to instead follow a path that would lead to a stable and comfortable life,” says Tiatia, who followed her mother’s advice and completed a Bachelor of Commerce at university.
The universe had other plans, however.
“I never did get that office job,” says Tiatia. “By the time I graduated, I was pregnant with my wonderful son, Quinn. And it was during the early days of being a mum that gave me the space to reawaken my instincts and interest in becoming an artist. So, when he was a little older, I returned to study and completed a second Bachelor, this time in Visual Arts.”
Today, Tiatia is an artist who works across many mediums, including painting, performance, sculpture, film and sound. She is best known for her work with film and video, which she likens to “watching a slow-moving painting”.
Her work explores themes of “gender, neo-colonialism and the commodification of the body and place” and the way they intersect. “I tend to use the lenses of history and popular culture to illuminate them,” she says.
Part of video’s appeal for Tiatia as a medium is that it is both immersive and ethereal. “When you are experiencing it, you can feel like you are within the world you are viewing and yet, when you switch it off, it’s gone. There’s nothing physical left – just the memory and the thoughts and feelings it aroused,” she says. “I love this.”
At art school, Tiatia was disturbed by the large volume of waste the students created. “I used to make large sculptures, and after they were marked, they would all go into a skip,” she says. “Our department would throw out so much rubbish every week, and this weighed heavily on my mind.”
Film offered a solution to this problem. Tiatia was “drawn to moving image and video art as a way of being able to create works that were less bound by materiality,” she says.
Two of Tiatia’s works appear in Matisse Alive, a free program of art, music, performance and community celebrating the influence of Henri Matisse, the subject of Art Gallery of NSW's blockbuster exhibition Matisse: Life & Spirit.
One is Hibiscus Rosa Sinensis, an early video work that features Tiatia as the sole performer. “It explores and challenges a particular myth related to the hibiscus flower, an icon of the Pacific,” she says “It is one unbroken shot – about a minute long – starting from a full screen of lush tropical greenery, which then tracks forward until you see me. It was shot in Rarotonga, and there are no edits or colour manipulation – what you see on the screen is what was shot on camera.”
Paired with it is pearl, a new work “made using computer software and artificial intelligence to create a world that is simulated but feels and looks as close as possible to reality” – even “beyond real,” she says. “Hyperreal.”
pearl pays homage to Matisse’s Venus in a Shell bronze sculpture, currently showing in Matisse: Life & Spirit. “The European myth of Venus/Aphrodite has always spoken to me, as it has similarities to the Pasifika origin myth of Ta’aroa, a creator god born out of a clamshell and sea foam,” Tiatia says.
Tiatia says she feels honoured to be part of the Matisse Alive exhibition, a milestone she counts as a career highlight. “It is a great feeling to be supported by one of the most influential and important art institutions in the country alongside amazing female artists: Nina Chanel Abney, Sally Smart and Robyn White,” she says.
Like many artists, Tiatia admires Matisse’s bold use of colour and form. “His work ethic and his inquisitiveness to solve fundamental problems in painting led to breakthrough moments,” she says. “He was so prolific and such an important and influential artist to so many of us.”
Matisse: Life & Spirit has now finished. Matisse Alive runs until April 3.
This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
