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Tongan artists, mother and daughter duo were selected by the Chinese World Craft Council, to showcase the art of Tongan tapa cloth making for the Dongyang Woodcraft and Bamboo Expo.
RICKY WILSON/Stuff Sulieti Fieme’a Burrows and her daughter Tui Emma Gillies’s Voyagers: The Niu World will be exhibited at the Tautai Pacific Art Gallery at Karangahape Rd in Auckland’s CBD on February 19. Burrows learnt tapa-making from her mother at Falevai village on Vava’u in Tonga. It was from her that she also learnt how to weave, sew, bake and make kahoa heilala (garland). When she migrated to New Zealand in 1978, Burrows took a break from crafts to raise her family but took it up again a few years later, selling plus-sized lingerie she’d made at the Ōtara markets.