As a child growing up in suburban Brisbane my mother was the embodiment of my Tahitian ethnicity and our locus of home. Her death in 1994 triggered the dissolution of our family, severed the connection to the Tahitian aspects of my self-identity, and magnified the challenges of diaspora and hybridity. My Skin, An Island is an experimental moving image work made through the lens of grief. It explores the unravelling of identity in the aftermath of the loss of a parent for children of the diaspora. Simultaneously, through the methodical weaving of a century of family archives with performative self- portraiture, it attempts to create a totemic work that anchors both myself and my children to our collective cultural identity, and perhaps, our future.

This work draws inspiration from the Vā, the space between that folds time and connects biographical epochs beyond the constraints of Western linear temporality. It is a meditation on the mana of Tahiti, saturated in the rhythm of the ocean that defines our islands, flows through our veins, and binds us across vast distances.

The making of the work itself was a ritualised braiding of the taura tupuna (ancestral cord) that takes the frayed threads of my identity and weaves the ancestral past into the present and the future. Its purpose, to decolonise and invigorate my Tahitian cultural heritage.

My Skin, An Island builds on the idea that family photographs are totemic objects imbued with ancestral meaning. The work attempts to activate photography’s potential to traverse the temporal and spatial. By incorprating images from almost a century of family archives: photos of my mama and grandmother (Tahiti, the 1930s-1950s); woven with new family and landscape photos made when my husband, daughters, and I, returned to live in the islands (Moorea and Tahiti, 2006-2009).

As the work progressed and the taura tupuna was woven, I danced Ori Tahiti (Tahitian dance). At times I danced until I could no longer stand and through the dance connected with my mother's spirit, ancestors, and fenua (land); the performance itself was a ritual photographed and woven into the final work.

“Using these images, we connect ourselves to a recuperative, redemptive memory that enables us to construct radical identities, images of ourselves that transcend the colonising eye.”

bell hooks