Sofia Tekela-Smith: Grace / 12 November - 5 December 2008

I am fascinated with the representation of island women as bare-breasted in tropical paradise. Hell. I was living in that paradise and the most you’d see was women in t-shirts, maybe with sun umbrellas.
(Tekela-Smith, Staple Magazine, Aug/Sept, 2004)

Incorporating her signature hand-crafted body adornment with a series of staged photographs, Sofia Tekela-Smith presents herself in the guise of Venus and Madonna - two divergent ideals of female gender constructed in the West. With assistance from photographer Sean Coyle, Tekela-Smith realises her vision, taking as her model two famous Renaissance paintings - Sandro Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus c.1485 (Uffizi Gallery, Florence) and Raphael’s Madonna and Child tondo c.1504 (Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). From a classical narrative, the deity of beauty and love is transformed into a Polynesian Goddess, born from the foam of the Pacific Ocean. Similarly, the Polynesian Madonna with child is located, not within a typical pastoral European landscape, but a tropical one with palm trees swaying in the background and the familiar cumulous clouds looming against the horizon. Works of this nature have examined the artist’s ongoing dialogue with notion of the 'Dusky Maiden' - a stereotypical image of the Polynesian woman framed as the passive, sexualised, erotic 'other'. Interestingly these works also review broader Western stereotypes about females, namely the 'virgin/whore' dichotomy.

Tekela-Smith takes a post-colonial strategy affirming the right to control her own image/myth-making and reinvest spurious stereotypes with dignity. As with many of Tekela-Smith’s works, the pieces are often imbued with personal significance. Of this exhibition’s theme Tekela-Smith says -

I found a photo of my mother on the net a while back dressed in a nun's habit. ‘Grace’ is about a woman who runs away from the church. It explores what happens when she discovers her sexuality/womanhood - becomes a mother but at the same time still keeps her faith/religion/spirituality in her God. It’s a family story…my family history...it's her history. What was it like to one day give yourself to God and the next moment be a married woman in a new country? (Tekela-Smith, 2008)

Tekela-Smith makes works which acknowledge and celebrate her Rotuman heritage whilst also investigating wider implications of commodification, eroticisation, stereotyping and the objectification of Polynesia - its culture and its inhabitants. Collected by the likes of Parisian designer Jean Paul Gaultier, Sofia Tekela-Smith’s adornments confound the boundaries of high art, customary craft and haute-couture. Far from being accoutrements to fashion, Tekela-Smith’s pieces are often considered as part of a carefully planned installation featuring photography, figurative wall sculpture and jewellery. Sofia Tekela-Smith's work has been included in numerous exhibitions including; Paradise Now? at the Asia Contemporary Society Museum, New York, 2004, the International Festival of the Arts in Belau, 2004 and News from Islands at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales, 2007. Her works are held in public collections in the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, Grassi Museum, Leipzig, Germany and the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia.