Tonga: Artist's innovations win world's first Pacific woman practice-led PhD ^Featured

Talita’s doctoral thesis developed two new kinds of portraiture: two-metre long portraits printed on ngatu, and three complementing filmic projections that change gracefully with the telling of the subject’s memories.

PhD examiner, Professor Konai Helu-Thaman described the submission as being in the top 5 per cent of any thesis she has marked in the last fifteen years, and another examiner described it as "an academic and cultural milestone".

The portraits considered a new way of depicting the experiences of three hou’eiki fafine (Tongan women) who left their homeland to settle abroad. Lesini Finau Vakalahi, Senolita Vatuvei Afemui, and Telesia Tonga’s portraits represent a new kind of poetry in pictures. Each work is made up of tiny elements that were combined in a lyrical manner comparable to the way ideas are connected in a piece of poetry. The works combined photography, animation, musical composition, sound design, filmed interviews, graphic design, sublimation printing on ngatu, and extensive postproduction compositing.

Tolutau explains that her multi-cultural upbringing in both Pacific and Western culture was a key influencer in developing her interest in her field of study.

“The synergy that my exposure to both cultures produced did much to fashion my creativity, deepen my appreciation of my Tongan culture and help me to lash together spiritual and academic dimensions into an interest in culturally influenced design.”

“As I matured, the Tongan voices of the hou’eiki fafine in my community permeated my ways of thinking. They caused me to reach for understanding by listening, feeling, learning and luva.”

“Their talanoa has shaped my understanding of culture in profound ways because my personal growth and cultural identity was (and remains) intrinsically connected to their past experiences.

“The stories of migration that they told me as a child were not like those written in my social studies books. Nor were they like the representations of Tongan people portrayed on the news items that flickered occasionally over the television set. They were something different. Their talanoa is full of laughter, sadness, detail, memory and loss. There are secrets alluded to, and experiences of something missing. The spaces between what they say and the distinctive ways that their recollections reconstitute time are as important as what is recounted.”

As Tolutau listed and watched these hou’eiki fafine tell their stories of migration it became obvious to her that not only their experiences but also their unique way of recounting needed
to be documented.
“Their largely unrecorded experiences of hardship, integration and settlement in foreign countries fuelled my creativity even more,” says Tolutau.

Drawing on the little known Tongan construct of veitalatala, Tolutau’s accompanying 50,000 word thesis proposed through practice, that this method of communication might be extended into a poetic form of portraiture to create a contemporary, lyrical, yet culturally respectful means of representing histories and memories of Tongan hou’eiki fafine.

“The word thesis in western culture means to position an idea,” explains Tolutau.

“But it is something more than this: It can be a respectful gift that draws on generations of knowledge and respectfully returns something new that might be useful, both to those who now live with us and to those who will come after us.”

“I am a woman scholar and a designer, but I am also a learner and I will always understand my role in this capacity. This thesis exists because people have taught me things – it is a thesis rich with the perfume of ideas and the lyricism of women’s stories.”

Tolutau joined AUT’s School of Art & Design as a certificate student in 2003. She then gained her Bachelor's degree in graphic design, her honours degree, followed by her Masters with First Class Honours. Her work for her PhD was a finalist in the NZ BEST design awards in 2009.

She worked with three supervisors throughout the course of her PhD: Professor Welby Ings, Dr Linita Manu’atu and Mr Sione Tu’itahi.

Professor Ings described the thesis that took Talita four years to develop as having brought into an essentially western academy, not the cosmetics of culture but deeply informed roots that not only shaped the content of her work but also the values and processes that underpinned the research.

“Her thesis is an elegant meeting of the scholarly and the artistic that required very critical thinking and an immense amount of courage, review and refinement,” says Professor Ings.

Source: AUT University News