“My favorite thing about kapa is that it is simultaneously ancestral, ancient, and contemporary,” says Lehuauakea (Kanaka Maoli), who recently received the Walker Youngbird Foundation grant for emerging Native American artists. Kapa, the Indigenous Hawaiian practice of clothmaking, uses the inner bark of the wauke, or paper mulberry tree, to create garments and textiles. For Lehuauakea, the technique forms the foundation of a practice rooted in the artist’s Hawaiian lineage and material traditions.
Softening the fibers enough to create cloth requires a labor-intensive method of soaking pieces of bark. Through an arduous process of beating and stretching with tools like the iʻe kuku, a thin, pliable fabric emerges. “It is a very malleable material that reflects the current state of the natural environment, and the surrounding community and personal hand of the maker,” Lehuauakea tells Colossal. “It requires a level of patience and perseverance while also paying close attention to the nature of the bark and pigments you are working with.”
Kapa is derived from ancient Polynesian practices—it’s called tapa in other parts of the Pacific—and Hawaiians elaborated on the custom by incorporating watermarks, natural pigments, and fermentation.
Traditionally, kapa possessed both practical and spiritual qualities, as it was used for everyday apparel and bedding but also served as a carrier of mana, or healing life force. When the U.S. controversially annexed the territory and the import of cotton amped up in the late 19th century, the practice all but died out.
Lehuauakea’s interest in kapa emerged when their family relocated to Oregon when they were young. Over time, the artist felt increasingly disconnected from their home and sought a way to conjure a link to their Hawaiian ancestry.
“I remembered learning about kapa as a child and how we’d use patterns to tell stories, so in my junior year of college I taught myself how to carve ʻohe kāpala, or traditional carved bamboo printing tools used for decorating finished kapa,” the artist says. Then it was onto learning how to make the barkcloth itself, with the help of artisan and mentor Wesley Sen, spurring Lehuauakea’s passion for the medium.
Fascinated by the potential to not only continue a time-honored Kanaka Maoli art form but also to experiment and push the boundaries of the material, Lehuauakea makes large-scale installations, hand-stitched garments, mixed-media suspended works, and hand-painted two-dimensional compositions— “in other words, forms that you wouldn’t see in ancestral samples of pre-contact Hawaiian kapa,” they say. The artist continues:
As an Indigenous cultural practitioner and artist, I believe it is important to have a solid foundation in the traditional knowledge of the practice before attempting to expand on it or experiment with more contemporary expressions of the medium because I am not singular in this work; I am simply building on a tradition that was passed down through many generations before me, and I can only hope that I am able to inspire future generations to continue it.
Lehuauakea is currently working toward solo exhibitions at the Center for Contemporary Art Santa Fe and Nunu Fine Art in New York City, exploring ideas around Native Hawaiian cosmology, celestial cycles, and the relationship between Native Hawaiian language and pattern. Find more on the artist’s website.
