To spend an hour with multi-dimensional artist Lindah Lepou is to be taken to a world full of texture, history and a richness of cultural respect.
She’s known not only for her fabulous creations, but also for the fact they are burnt at the end of the exhibition. Her work for Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival will be no different.
Lepou’s journey is one of resilience and her story is one of discovery.
The artist is nationally acclaimed and won the inaugural Arts Foundation queer arts laureate award, with work in Te Papa’s permanent collection, among many other accolades.
Her creations have been exhibited across the globe and alongside some of the biggest names in fashion including Chanel, Dior and Vivienne Westwood to name a few.
She is a fa’afafine woman who is anchored by her ancestry underpinning all she does.
Lepou’s work Pacific Couture is entrenched in the same grounded manner, featuring natural fibres, coconut shell, sea shells, flax and tapa cloth in contemporary ways. She creates in fabric too and seamlessly walks the line between art and fashion.
She builds on both her Pacific and Pākehā ancestry in all she creates.
Throughout her career she has helped many emerging and established designers and artists around the world with their own artistic practice, concepts and identity by focusing them on their unique whakapapa as the main source of inspiration and their anchor.
For her debut at the Arts Festival Lupou has created a 50m long installation of 50 giant roses made from recycled paper and environmentally friendly glue. It just happens to be in her 50th year too.
“Paperwork is symbolic of taking the simplest and cheapest of materials and [letting] that force the innovation to come through. It is what you make of it.”
They are words that her grandmother often said.
It’s nothing that needs to be explained or justified. “My art is the joy of giving birth to the work and through that creative process, I am invoking the work with the me of that moment. In burning I am letting it go.”
It is there that she feels darkness bringing an opportunity to be honest with herself. The evolution of her work is a reflection of the evolution of herself. “The whole creative process has counselled me, accepted me, saves me and excites me.”
Lepou has bounced around the world, living in many places before landing in Gisborne in 2020 purely by chance thanks to an invite from a fellow artist. “I was waiting for her at the airport for her to arrive and I knew immediately I would be moving here. I felt a contentment, an alignment and peace.”
Her healing over the past three years has been significant. “You hear a lot about anxiety and mental health – both being critical for human success. It was a long time coming for me to be in a place to start making peace . . . but we are here now. Moving here was a wonderful timing.”
"I love that Te Papa find my work significant enough to preserve. And that the Arts Foundation giving me the inaugural laureate was a wonderful symbol of how open minded and how secure institutions are becoming,” she said.
Her idea of success is pretty straightforward.
“I am really proud to be alive,” she said.
“My childhood was really intense, tough, lonely, abusive and more. At a young age I was forced to not just to compartmentalise everything as a survival mechanism, but also to wake up sooner to my own awareness of who I am and what I am . . . and what my future is going to be.”
THE DETAILS
WHAT: Paper Series by Lindah Lepou
WHERE: War Memorial Theatre
WHEN: 12 noon-3pm daily, October 6-13, 224
Free entry
