Visesio Siasau wins big at the Wallace Art Awards

Paramount Award winner Visesio Siasau (left), daughter Sei Siasau and wife Serene Tay; Below, detail of a tapa cloth by Visesio Siasau. Photo / Wallace Arts Trust

Artist Visesio Siasau is off to New York with his family for six months after winning the big prize in the Wallace Art Awards this week. He and his artist wife, Serene Tay, talk to Linda Herrick

Meet Team Siasau: artists Visesio Siasau and his wife Serene Tay with their daughter Sei. At Pah Homestead on Monday night Visesio, aka Sio, was named Paramount Award Winner in the 24th Wallace Art Awards for his huge tapa bark work. Its formal title, Onotu'ofe'uli - Onotu'ofekula, translates to "strands of colour inextricably connected to the qualities of kula (red colour/light) and 'uli (black colour)".

Serene and Sio worked on the project together last year in Tonga, so it is fitting the family is reaping the reward of the paramount win together - a six-month residency, plus stipends, in New York - an achievement that has blown their minds. It was unexpected too. Sio was filming the announcement on his cellphone and didn't even hear his own name called out.

The tapa cloth, which measures 4.4m by 18m, is so heavy it had to be cut in half at Tonga airport to make it on to the plane last November. "I came back to New Zealand two days before Sio," says Serene. "His plane was leaving at 1am and at 10.30pm he was ringing me from the airport to say he can't take it because it was way over 23kg. We had absolutely no more money to get another bag so he was literally ringing me, cutting it, and totally distressed. I told him, 'You know what? If this is the way it has to be, you'll have to do it.'

"The most amazing thing was, the airline sensed the distress in him. This was like leaving half of your cultural treasure behind and they were really gracious about it and let him take it on board. In New Zealand, we had to repaste it together."

The work features 23 different stencil designs, which are doubled up and repeated on a black background. The stencils are Sio's sophisticated interpretations of the powerful role of the Christian church in Tonga within the historical context of the symbols of traditional Tongan life, a relationship which has created tension throughout the Pacific region. "Tension is a good thing," he says. "It enables a dynamic of creativity, a dynamic of therapy. These are huge subjects to discuss, the representation of a complexity of knowledge."

Visesio Siausau stands in front of his work Tongan Tapa Cloth. Photo / Supplied

The project worked on two levels, with Sio creating the stencils and Serene working with a collective of women in Tonga to make the tapa. "We had thousands of layers of tapa sheets - the bark comes from the mulberry, which is beaten down into sheets - and we had a long table with a line of people on both sides glueing with tapioca. We had to work very fast, pasting it and rolling it and then we got it down to two layers."

"And we were printing the stencils at the same time, on sacks, like the flour sacks that come to Tonga," adds Sio. "At home I have stencils with part of the stencil made from fishing line, talking about the unrestricted harvesting of our ocean, which is a huge problem in Tonga."

"The physical manifestation of what you see now was about a week to process really fast," says Serene. "If you leave it too long, it gets hard and you can't do it. So you have to go bang bang bang for the first 12 hours. You can't go and eat ... it can rip and tear. The humidity in Tonga makes it dry very fast and you need to get the stencils on."

The next step is the dyeing of the cloth using burnt candle nuts mixed and ground with black mangroves. "I grew up in a family where my mum and all the women were making tapa," says Sio. "That's how I learnt. The whole approach here is contemporising the style. I extract or borrow from our ancient traditional form and I modify that to suit the knowledge behind it so they can be applied to religion, economics... "

Serene, who is Chinese-Maori, and Sio first met at the Buck Nin School of Fine Arts at Te Wananga o Aotearoa (TWOA) in Mangere about 11 years ago. Last year, they both completed masters degrees at TWOA.

"I am a painter and I was just finishing and he was just starting as a sculptor," recalls Serene. "For me, I recognised that we have work to do together and that has got us to where we are today, sitting in the Pah. This is quite incredible."

Sio's working life began as an electrician in the Tongan Navy. "In Tonga, you are always pushed by your parents to get an education and get a good job after that," he says. "Art was always around me - my dad's side were painters and my mum's side were sculptors and they are still doing it today. But back home, if you do art" - he taps his head - "they say you are not good at thinking. At school I was into maths, science and physics, because that's the line I wanted to go into. One of my uncles, who I idolised, was on one of our Navy boats and I looked at him sailing all over the world and I thought, 'I can be like him.' I was there for three years but then I felt I had to move to New Zealand to help my parents pay for my three younger brothers' school fees. That's how I ended up in Otara staying with my uncle who is a carver.

"When I saw the work, I thought, 'I can do that.' While I was learning, I realised there were some aspects of carving I wanted to explore and that's when I started looking at the books. I have been living in New Zealand for 20 years and I go home a lot and I try to make them see the importance of art because it is within them all. What we do is carving the brain. When you look at something, it starts to ignite some kind of thinking."

Expect plenty of ignition happening in the Siasau family during their six months in New York. "It's life-changing," says Serene. "It is giving us the opportunity to look and also to create," says Sio. "It will take the work to a higher level."