Lily Aitua Laita

'Defekefenated Fa'amolemole' 2008

Lily Aitua Laita (b. 1969) has achieved widespread recognition as both an accomplished artist and art educator. Her works are characteristically expressive in style, featuring vivid colour and layering of line and form. Her abstracted subjects explore an ambiguous sense of space and time, communicating an interaction between dreams, Pacific mythology, journeys and notions of intuitive and learned knowledge.

Lily’s paintings often express personal narratives, which reflect her mixed ancestry of New Zealand Pakeha, Maori (Ngati Raukawa) and Samoan descent. Lily’s works attempt to address the various ways that cultures communicate and record knowledge and how art can become a vehicle for discussion and discourse. The inclusion of Samoan, Maori and English text invests her paintings with another dimension of understanding and 'reading the

narratives', highlighting the significance of Polynesian mythology and oratory traditions. The figurative forms are layered and abstracted and words function as clues, often encompassing multiple readings. Figures and faces surface from the landscape after careful observation referencing the way traditional knowledge is not always given in full but rather revealed over time. From 2002, the use of text as a form is painted backwards referring to the first written known Samoan texts in English, although it also reinforces the artist's inference to the ethereal 'va' of the picture plane.   

Lily’s early paintings employed the use of

'Tu'u ai ni vai' (LUPE,STOOL,AVA) 2008

acrylic and oil stick on black building paper, often on a large scale. What was initially a practical and economical decision developed into her distinct and physically expressive signature style. From 1999 Lily developed into using oil on canvas; while retaining the energy of earlier works her oil paintings extend on previous investigations of layering and depth of form. More recently Lily has been painting on smaller sized canvas and cane trays. Made by the RSA, hobby groups and rehabilitation workers, Lily’s cane tray works explore ideas and gender identities relating to 'tautua' (service) and consumption of objects of desire.

Lily studied at the Elam School of Fine Art, University of Auckland graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1990 and completed her Masters in Painting in 2002. Since the late 1980s Lily has exhibited widely including Te Moemoea no Iotefa, (Sargeant Gallery and tour 1990-91), Bottled Ocean, (City Gallery, Wellington and tour 1993-94), Tu Fa'atasi International Festival of the Arts (1994), The Seventh South Pacific Festival of the Arts, Western Samoa (1996), ReDress at Auckland Museum (1997), Tu'u i ai ni vai at Whitespace Gallery, Melbourne (2000),VAhine (2003) at the Lane Gallery and Samoa Contemporary (Pataka, Porirua 2007, Sarjeant Gallery 2008).