Sumba

Sumba

Born from FLOX’s Artist in Residence experience on the Indonesian island of Sumba, this collection is an exploration of place, culture and connection to the land.

The journey began in Sumba, where the artist spent three weeks immersed in an environment rich with tradition, ceremony and a deeply rooted relationship between people and place. Encounters with local communities, traditional architecture, ikat weaving, indigenous flora and fauna, and the rhythms of everyday island life became the foundation for a body of work created during the residency.

Returning home to Aotearoa, the experience continued to resonate.

What began in Sumba evolved into a new series of works exploring the parallels observed between two distinct cultures — separated by ocean and geography, yet connected through ideas of whenua, ancestry, nourishment, gathering and community.

The collection brings the original Sumba works together with FLOX’s new Hononga Wall Hanging series, created in Aotearoa as a continuation of that conversation. Māori references sit alongside memories and observations from Sumba, not as an attempt to merge the two cultures, but to acknowledge the threads of connection FLOX experienced between them — the ways people gather, cultivate, honour those who came before, celebrate together and maintain relationships with the natural world.

Rendered through FLOX’s own visual language of birds, botanicals, pattern, symbolism and hand-cut forms, these works are a personal response to an experience that began far from home and ultimately offered a new lens through which to consider home itself.

Two lands. Two distinct cultures. A shared reverence for place, people and belonging.