Christina Pataialii’s installations explore issues of identity, inheritance and the history and practice of painting. Her works are often executed on the rough cloth her father would use as protective drop sheets for his house-painting jobs. Pataialii’s medium is a mixture of domestic house paint with artist acrylic paints, while her brushstrokes are wide and gestural — a visual representation of her own body’s movements on long days spent painting houses with her father when she was a teenager in Auckland.

There is a strong sense of immediacy in the artist’s practice of building, scraping and erasing the surface of her canvases, as well as working across multiple surfaces simultaneously. Pataialii experiments with combinations of paints to create a spatial push-and-pull between depth and flatness, which hints at underlying narratives and alternative histories, as she explains:

I use the formal language [of paint] to play out ideas, much like words form different ideas, depending on how they are constructed. There are so many ways to explore and investigate through paint that you end up with a visual depiction of something that is perhaps more representational, yet it can also be the visual depiction of problem-solving material, space and composition, form, colour and surface . . . [or] unpacking a memory or an observation . . .

Refusing to adopt clichéd cultural tropes often associated with Pasifika artists in Aotearoa, Pataialii’s confident practice broadens our understanding of contemporary Pacific art and experience.