Tui Emma Gillies is a Tongan New Zealand artist who preserves her family’s ancestral DNA through the sacred ritual of tapa making. Her work mixes contemporary with traditional and can be challenging, confronting and controversial, but always with respect to the roots of the medium and the ancestors who practised it before her. Tui’s work can be found in significant museum and gallery collections around the globe including, USA, Germany, Melbourne, Auckland, and also in many private collections. In 2018 she received the Creative New Zealand Pacific Heritage Art Award and also helped revive hiapo growing and the art of bark cloth making alongside her mother in Falevai, Vava’u where it had vanished decades earlier.
Tui Emma Gillies
