Leafa Wilson 

Based in Kirikiriroa-Hamilton, Leafa/Janice Wilson is a conceptual
artist, whose practice embraces multimedia, installation and curatorial
projects.

Messing with her Samoan, German heritage, a large part of Leafa's
focus is on scrutinising the ideologies that shape our social conduct or
cultural expectations and providing (positioning) a subaltern voice.


"In this journey across borders I find myself in liminal spaces where
discomfort is the most evident state of being and a place that I feel
most comfortable. I enjoy the comfort/discomfort and sense of
displacement that often occurs."


In her exhibition Ich Helsse Olga Hedwig Krause Leafa offers herself as
a site of contest, interrogating her identity as Samoan/German-
Colonised/Coloniser. Incorporating a soundtrack by the German group
Kraftwerk, authenticating her German heritage through her grandfather's
birth certificate, Leafa projected images of herself overlaid by images
of women who looked more 'typically' German.


As a curator Leafa distinguished herself through the group exhibition,
Dolly mix (w) rapper (2002) thanks to the efforts of Jakki Leota-Ete who
was the institutional curator Pasifika and Maori at Waikato Museum at
that time. This exhibition revealed and embraced the diversity of
Samoan experience and art practice and stands as the first and most
comprehensive exhibition of Contemporary Samoan woman artists to date.
As both curator and artist Leafa continues to juxtapose dichotomies and
difference, bringing into proximity disparate elements, artists of
varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Working in different contexts, genres and mediums, she states; "I am looking for the utopia of perfect race relations - an ideal and perfect place where everyone lives in harmony."

More recently (2008), Leafa has worked on a variety of collective projects in Kirikiriroa-Hamilton, with the UNDERWATER COLLECTIVE - in a stencil art show entitled 'Post-digital Primitive' and with the New Friends Contemporary Art Space she was the subject of scrutiny as a savage Loga Erasuk in her show ANTRHO.101 which was a performance based work including Dr Nichola Harcourt and Faith Wilson acting as anthropologists and religiolists. Exhibitions during 2006 include Ich Helsse Olga Hedwig Krause (Burke Museum - University of Washington, Seattle, Sofa Gallery, Christchurch), and the group exhibition Delineate (Chartwell Gallery), challenging the way drawing often becomes a pivot around which an artist's talent is measured. In October she toured works from her exhibition Ich Helsse Olga Hedwig Krause through Australia and gave a presentation at Griffiths College of Art, Griffith University,Brisbane on herself/ body as a discursive site in the seminar series Art in Arcadia. Leafa also works as Contemporary Art Curator at the Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato.