Vaimaila Urale

Vaimaila Urale is a Samoan born interdisciplinary artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She has whakapapa to the villages of Fagamalo, Matavai, Falealupo and Safa’ato’a, Lefaga. Her practice weaves traditional Samoan symbols which employ ASCII characters—such as “<”, “>”, “/”, and “\” to reinterpret motifs found in Samoan tattooing (tatau) and bark cloth (tapa), bridging ancestral knowledge with modern digital languages. “As a visual artist, embedding Samoan symbols at the heart of my practice is both vital and empowering. By drawing on digital vernacular, I consciously engage with the continuum of knowledge systems and patterns unique to my community, reimagining them within contemporary spaces." She has exhibited widely across Aotearoa, including at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, The Dowse Art Museum, and Māngere Arts Centre, as well as internationally at Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway; Para Site, Hong Kong; Casablanca Biennale Morocco, and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Australia. She is also a member of collaborative art collective D.A.N.C.E. art club.

Lole Popo is inspired by a talanoa with artist Erich Roebeck and our shared whakapapa to Samoa. We talked about our love of Samoan food, cooking it and how it connected us to our aiga. We talked about our favourite Samoan dishes, many of which involve the process of caramelising sugar and adding coconut cream. I have memories of eating lole popo, coconut lollies as a child. I worked with my daughters to make the coconut sweets which are traditionally village treats. Together we scraped the flesh of coconuts in unison. We squeezed the coconut cream from the flesh and used the pegu, or dry coconut, to add to melted raw sugar. Lastly, we hand-rolled balls of the sticky candy and wrapped them in paper. Much of my work explores cultural knowledge transmission, whether it's using digital patterns on lolly wrappers based on the tusili’i (the symbol for small lines on coconut leaves) or teaching my children how to cook Samoan food. In Samoa, lole popo is made to be shared and for this art work we gift them to you.