Reading the Silence: Inside Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka’s KUMI MOE HELIAKI
Image credit: Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka, KUMI MOE HELIAKI: Blackened Tapa and Metaphor, Installation view, Aigantighe Art Gallery, Timaru, 2025. Courtesy of Aigantighe Art Gallery.
Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka’s KUMI MOE HELIAKI is a smoke-scorched, metaphor-rich exhibition that refuses to play translator for the Pacific experience, daring viewers to sit with its silence and complexity.
Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka’s KUMI MOE HELIAKI is a major exhibition for the Aigantighe Art Gallery, the civic art museum of Timaru, South Canterbury, Aotearoa, New Zealand’s South Island. Born in Tonga, the artist is based in Ōtautahi, Christchurch. He was the first Tongan artist to hold a solo show at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in 2021, and his pieces now reside in major public collections across Aotearoa and Australia. Maka was a featured artist in the 2020 Biennale of Sydney and in KUMI MOE HELIAKI is a slow-burn, smoke-stained meditation on what it means to speak in metaphor when the world keeps asking for plain speech. Indeed, the artist likens his approach to abstraction to Faka-Tu‘i, the highly stylised and metaphorical Tongan dialect reserved for the Royal Family, which, while a core part of Tongan ceremonial culture, is largely incomprehensible to the average Tongan.
At first glance, Maka’s blackened tapa (ngatu ‘uli) might read as minimalist. Even austere. But this isn’t Rothko or Matisse with a Pacific twist (though they’re in there, the modernist fascination with the Pacific has not been forgotten and is reciprocated). It’s not about reduction, but rather, a refusal to explain, to translate, or to simplify his vision.
Image credit: Kulimoe'anga Stone Maka, Kumi ē Manatu, 2021. Courtesy of Aigantighe Art Gallery.
In Tongan tradition, ngatu ‘uli is unmarked by design. Its power lies in what it withholds, what it refuses to show. Maka leans into that silence and amplifies it. Kiribati poet Teresia Teaiwa’s critique of “militourism”, the commodification of Pacific bodies and land, lurks in the background here. Maka’s refusal to decorate, his embrace of blackness and absence, can be read as a counter to that gaze. His works do not perform. They endure and insist.
Samoan writer Albert Wendt’s call for a “new Oceania,” in which Pacific artists reclaim narrative sovereignty, finds resonance in Maka’s practice. Wendt’s concept of pōuliuli, darkness as generative space, is embodied in Maka’s blackened tapa. The void is a womb of potentials, an image that extends into the ancient past of Polynesia, long before the missionaries and colonists.
The show’s title, KUMI MOE HELIAKI, is a double dare: a pursuit of both the material (kumi) and the metaphorical (heliaki). Heliaki is the art of saying one thing and meaning another. As the art historian Karen Stevenson reminds us in her book The Frangipani is Dead: Contemporary Pacific Art in New Zealand 1985-2000 (2009), metaphor in Pacific art isn’t decorative, it’s epistemological. Pacific artists often operate in “a space of cultural negotiation,” says Stevenson, where metaphor safeguards meaning from colonial flattening. A work without heliaki is hualela: flat, blunt, spiritually vacant. Maka’s work is anything but.
Part of the charm is the unexpected materials and techniques: candlenut soot, carefully collected and consolidated spiderwebs, clay, born of ancestral technologies. Each mark (or deliberate non-mark) is a tether between seen and unseen worlds. This is abstraction, modified from tradition, as cosmology, continuity, and coded resistance. As Tongan-Fijian anthropologist Epeli Hau‘ofa might say, they are “not passive victims of history,” but active agents in a vast, oceanic network of meaning. Maka’s use of tapa as both medium and message echoes Hau‘ofa’s vision of Oceania as a “sea of islands”, a network of meaning rather than a fragmented periphery.
Image credit: Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka, KUMI MOE HELIAKI: Blackened Tapa and Metaphor, Installation view, Aigantighe Art Gallery, Timaru, 2025. Courtesy of Aigantighe Art Gallery.
Technically, the process is meticulous and spiritual. Maka begins with hiapo (paper mulberry bark), beaten into cloth using traditional methods passed down through his family. The cloth is then smoked with candlenut soot—a process that stains the fibre with ancestral residue. Smoke, in this context, binds the physical to the metaphysical, marking the cloth with a presence that cannot be seen. The spiderwebs are applied to canvas and tapa, and painted. Their fragility and tensile strength echo the interwoven nature of heliaki, meaning suspended between threads. Maka has described the webs as “a net of meaning,” a trap for interpretation, and a tactile metaphor.
KUMI MOE HELIAKI features 15 paintings and six tapa cloths, some monumental in scale, like ‘Amato (2023), the largest ngatu ‘uli in the exhibition. It’s not a show you breeze through. It’s a charged site of encounter. The exhibition opened with a Tongan blessing and dance, coordinated with the South Canterbury Tongan Society. Timaru has a vibrant Tongan community, one not always as visible as it deserves to be, so it was fantastic to see the work in the context of a living cultural practice.
That provided a transformational dimension to the work, one foot in the white box of the gallery and one in a Tonga without borders that breathes, dances and sings.
KUMI MOE HELIAKI is now showing at Aigantighe Art Gallery, Timaru, until 8 February 2026.
