Louisa Afoa
Samoa /
Aotearoa New Zealand
Sāmoan,
Pasifika
Blue Clam
- 2018
- Digital photograph
- Purchased 2021
- 995 x 1490mm
- 2021/147
Location: Touring Gallery B
Tags: appropriation (imagery), clothes lines, fences, hoses (tools), houses, seashell, swimming pools, women (female humans)
“I can’t speak for all women of the Moana […] but my experiences with the wider societal representation of the Polynesian brown body have been binary. Either you fit into the male gaze’s dream of a dusky maiden, or you don’t.” Louisa Afoa’s glorious Blue Clam recreates and reframes the Birth of Venus, Botticelli’s pervasive vision of idealised feminine beauty, replacing it with a bold and empowering new one – her own brown body taking up space without apology.
(Dummies & Doppelgängers, 2 November 2024 – 23 March 2025)
Exhibition History
Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 16 August 2022 – 21 July 2024
A few years ago, Louisa Afoa began her ongoing project A Pool is not the Ocean when she moved from her family home in Papakura to Torbay on the North Shore of Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland – two suburbs with very different socioeconomic and cultural make-up. The series, which includes Blue Clam, explores brown bodies in white spaces, exposing moments of prejudice, misconception and racism in suburban middle-class New Zealand.
Blue Clam is a self-portrait in the style of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, an Italian Renaissance painting that shows the classical goddess of love and beauty arriving on land in a clam shell. Recreating the work in her own backyard, Louisa shows how beauty is contextual and depends on your cultural perspective – that there are many kinds of beauty.