The C Art Trust Award 2025/2026
Salome Tanuvasa

The recipient of the 2025/2026 award is Salome Tanuvasa.

Salome Tanuvasa is a New Zealand-born Tongan-Sāmoan artist whose practice responds directly to her environment and surroundings.

Certain shapes, colours and motifs recur and, by utilising what is around her in poetic and intuitive ways, the artist often speaks to the wider experience of Pacific people living in Aotearoa.

Salome works in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, textiles, photography and video. She is interested in speaking directly to the work of women like her mother, a seamstress, and her textile banner works – rather than being about ‘craft’ - are explorations of labour and joy within and beyond the domestic realm.

“I don't like wasting materials, and I love challenging myself and seeking potential in mundane objects and offcuts. This gives me a new sense of hope every time” 

Salome completed her Masters degree at Elam School of Fine Arts in 2014 and she followed this with a Diploma in Secondary Teaching. She lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and is represented by Tim Melville Gallery (Auckland) and Page Galleries (Wellington).

The curator for the C Art Trust Award to Salome Tanuvasa is Hanahiva Rose.

Hanahiva Rose is the Curator Contemporary Art at Te Papa and a doctoral candidate in Art History at Victoria University. She is co-lead curator for the 2025 re-opening of Te Papa’s Toi Art galleries and has previously curated exhibitions for Te Papa, National Library of New Zealand, Te Uru, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, and Enjoy Art Gallery. Hanahiva is a widely published writer, contributing to exhibition catalogues and arts publications in Aotearoa and internationally. 

'Salome Tanuvasa’s thoughtful and evocative paintings explore the qualities of form and colour. Using fluid, confident gestures, Tanuvasa abstracts details of everyday life: her parent’s East Auckland garden, tapa and fine mats from the family collection. “My paintings communicate an intuitive sense of the places where I find joy – in my home and with my family,” she says. I have been familiar with Tanuvasa’s practice for some time and was particularly struck by her recent paintings for their engagement with histories of European modernism. With determined vitality, Tanuvasa’s paintings offer a contemporary Pacific response to abstract painting traditions, locating themselves firmly in her culture and community while looking out towards the wider world. Her work follows the possibilities of a line, a mark: their capacity to repeat, evolve and carry us through time and space.'

Salome is represented in Auckland by Tim Melville Gallery.

Tim Melville (Te Arawa, Ngāti Whakaue, Te Atiawa) opened his Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland gallery in 2007.  The exhibition programme supports a roster of emerging, mid-career and senior artists from Aotearoa New Zealand, the Pacific and Australia.

As one of the few Māori gallerists in Aotearoa he is especially interested in championing indigenous artists’ work and has become known for introducing artists from remote Australian Aboriginal communities to New Zealand audiences.

As the art world moves away from traditional Eurocentric points of view, and as acknowledgements are made regarding indigenous attitudes towards whenua (Aotearoa) and country (Australia), Tim Melville’s kaupapa is focussed on exploring their meeting points.

Regrowing, 2023
poplin fabric and cotton
1640mm H x 1960mm W
Photo: Kallan MacLeod

Wonder, 2023
poplin fabric and cotton
1670mm H x 2910mm W
Photo: Kallan MacLeod

From Our Beautiful Square
Installation view, Gus Fisher Gallery Auckland, 2021
Photo: Kallan MacLeod

Untitled (Choose Happiness), 2021
acrylic on canvas
20 panels
Installation view, Murray Art Museum Albany 
Photo: Jeremy Weihrauch

Drawing Mum's Tapa, 2025
acrylic on canvas
570mm H x 720mm W
Photo: Kallan MacLeod

Untitled, 2021
acrylic on unstretched canvas
1025mm H x 1520mm W
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
Photo: Kallan MacLeod

Article text from ARTZONE Spring 2023
Salome Tanuvasa talks to Louise Garrett about the close connection between her surroundings and her art.

Salome Tanuvasa's work can loosely be located in the expanded field of drawing - a space of reflection and action somewhere between drawing, painting, sculpture and spatial design. Immersed in her immediate environment, she often re-purposes materials that are 'to hand'. Striving to be present and open to contingencies, her drawing practice is a means of thinking as well as an attempt to articulate the process of this thought. She aims to achieve a "state of flow" in her work – a space of intensely focused contemplation as a crucible for creative ideas and actions. Rather than treating a drawing as a plan for a future purpose, in Tanuvasa's work the gesture of mark-making is a purposeful activity in and of itself. It is made in a provisional, unfinished space. To borrow a phrase from American post-minimalist artist Robert Morris, it is an "interrogative space" in which the art is "coated or infected with a kind of question-like aspect.” Each question signifies a way station, a point of departure and return, a momentary pause, an anxious delay - the circulation of meaning is fragile and unsettled. Throughout her creative process, Tanuvasa asks: "How did I get to this point? What does it mean if I stop here? What will happen if I continue? Where am I going?" The shifting questions intimate a desire to "stay true to a moment that's always moving" and, she says, to "work intuitively within the space I'm creating. The artworks are the representation of these moments.”

Her upbringing in east Auckland as a child of Tongan and Samoan parents has had a deep influence on her creative practice and trajectory as an artist. She recalls taro, chilli bushes, and orange trees growing in her childhood garden - an environment that recalled her parents' island homes and also provided sustenance for the family. This combination of memory and utility was to influence her growing identity as an artist. Her burgeoning interest in art was nurtured during her education at a local Catholic primary school. Her home environment was full of the tools and activities of her parents' respective trades - her father was a mechanic and her mother a seamstress. Her love of materiality and her habit of using whatever is to hand, including the mundane and overlooked, stemmed from immersion in a household of industrial making and repair. This atmosphere, imbued with a DIY principle of "make do and mend”, finds an echo in a strand of contemporary art­ making concerned with appropriating and transforming everyday materials and things. As a child, Salome remembers constructing pieces from offcuts of her mother's fabrics and growing up to the sound of a sewing machine. Given this background, it is not surprising that Salome's brother John became a fashion designer.

After taking foundation courses at Manukau Institute of Technology in her 20s and with the responsibility of a growing family, she took a leap of faith to enrol in the undergraduate programme at Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts in 2014. She went on to gain her teaching certificate, and currently works full-time as an art and technology teacher at a high school for boys in Mangere. Her teaching reflects her own art practice: "When I'm teaching, I'm letting students find their inner voice and listen to their gut feeling in the artworks that they create.”

Her work has always responded to the conditions of her environment, including the pressures of work and family responsibilities. She typically works at night at her studio in Mt Wellington, habitually starting by cleaning up the space and writing a plan that often includes bullet points and questions prompted by the site and situation of her next exhibition. This ritual allows her to clear the way to begin to explore marks, forms, shapes and colours using a range of media and materials, including acrylic and marker pen on paper and card, paint, fabric, wall drawing, photography, video, and site­ specific installation.

The graphic quality of the distinctive lines, swirls and shapes in Salome's work suggests a form of writing - a set of gestures and articulations that intimate a proto-language. They appear as a visual language of floating signifiers, untethered to any definitive meaning. On these experiments with the idea of language, the artist has said that: "I draw from the rhythmic action of writing, and from the phenomenology of direct experiences that allows me to play in the area of how meaning is formed”. This sense of openness is an invitation for viewers to encounter and pay attention to a space of contemplation and playful experimentation, through a language that lies just beyond (re)cognition.

In 2021, Tanuvasa was commissioned by the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland to produce a site-responsive work for the group exhibition From Our Beautiful Square, created in response to the experience of restricted movement and social distancing in lockdowns during the covid pandemic. Tanuvasa has stated that a touchstone for her work is "always always my surroundings" and this project allowed her to experiment in a space beyond the scale of her immediate domestic environment or studio. In response to the Art Deco interior of the Gus Fisher's Dome Gallery, the artist translated her typical idiom of marks and strokes into brightly coloured cut­out fabric forms, hand-stitched onto big swathes of unstretched canvas floating in the gallery space. She also painted marks and forms, based on the subtle pastel colours and shapes coming through the gallery's stained­ glass dome, directly onto the gallery walls. The richly colourful and joyful work signalled an expansive new direction in the artist's practice as well as a positive recalibration and liberation from the strictures of lockdown.

In 2022, she spent a week at the Earthskin Waygood Foundation in Piha, which allowed her to reconnect with nature and natural forms, which she said "renewed her respect for nature and its grounding influence.” During the residency she produced a series of works on paper, which were shown as part of her exhibition A Study at Tim Melville Gallery. The orbit of Tanuvasa's creative universe continues to expand.

Stars Start Falling, 2021
Installation view, Salome Tanuvasa with Teuane Tibbo and Ani O'Neill, Te Uru, Waitakere, Auckland.
Photo: Kallan MacLeod

Mum's Oranges, 2024
acrylic on canvas
1200mm H × 1000 mm W
Collection of Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade
Photo: Kallan MacLeod

Encompass, 2024
acrylic on canvas
1200mm H x 1000mm W
Photo: Kallan MacLeod

Backdoor Banana Tree, 2024
acrylic on canvas
1000mm H × 1200 mm W
Photo: Kallan MacLeod

Salome Tanuvasa – Curriculum vitae