Photo by Sam Harnett
Southside Calling (2024)
Textile assemblage: Cotton duck canvas base with synthetic felt, hi-viz tape, pom-pom trim and cotton thread, EcoPine dowel, found materials. 1910x1430mm.
- Produced for To Live + Die in South Auckland (2024) solo project at Fresh Gallery Ōtara
Vasemaca Tavola arrived in South Auckland in 2002, flying from Suva, over her island, Dravuni, and the other islands of the Kadavu province.
This route would be travelled multiple times over the next 20 years. With maternal connections to Aotearoa, and paternal bonds to Fiji, cruising at altitude over the Pacific Ocean is where Tavola has found a unique sense of peace, somewhere between arriving and belonging.
From the sky, islands, reefs and lagoons appear in the deepest blues and greens, amongst the majesty of the mighty Pacific Ocean – the largest ocean basin on earth covering more than 155 million square kilometres.
The Pacific Ocean is a superhighway that brings all manner of things from the wider world into Pacific Island ecosystems. From settlers and tourists, noodles, Bibles, medical equipment to fabrics, tea, pests, drugs and plastic – what the sea brings influences and shapes lives. Yet, the scale at which vessels move through the Pacific Ocean, extracting and polluting, influencing and monetising, is largely unseen.
This work takes inspiration from Vessel Finder, a live tracking website that shows the movement of vessels in the world’s oceans in real time.
On Vessel Finder, different colours represent different types of vessel, but here they reference the influences that shape our lives from the foods we eat, the clothes we wear to the ways we encounter the world, and how the world encounters us.
vasemaca tavola 