During the pandemic, artist Maria Maea began to think about the idea of “resource” and developed a relationship with the ubiquitous palm, using the process of weaving fronds into sculptures as a meditation unlocking ancestral memories.
It’s a sunny afternoon, right before golden hour, and multidisciplinary artist Maria Maea is surrounded by palm fronds growing in the corner of a nondescript parking lot in Echo Park. She grabs her curved knife and cuts a few leaves before moving on to another location. This has been a ritual of hers for nearly two years, using the ubiquitous palm as material for mixed-media sculptures made of wire, dried plants and, often, casts of her family and friend’s faces.
It’s clear, Maea’s greatest inspiration is nature itself. She has an ability to see plant matter’s potential to create new worlds. “Plants have a body, we mimic it, it mimics us,” explains Maea. “I’ll use corn as a spine and people recognize it because we’re mirrors of nature.” The palm, a contentious signifier of L.A., is a ubiquitous, nonnative invasive species brought to the city decades ago to solidify the myth of Los Angeles as a “semi-tropic” paradise. For Maea, the complex identity of the palm felt like a mirror to her own identity growing up Samoan and Mexican in punk and DIY scenes in Long Beach. The palm inspired her to use this highly abundant, resilient, but often discarded element, and recontextualize it.
On a hot September day in Long Beach, Maea’s mother, little sister, two brothers and aunt sat in the frontyard of her mother’s home with palms in hand. Some were cutting thorns off stems, others weaved. Her aunt, Sanita Tuufuli, took a palm and started weaving it, explaining in the process how in Samoa the weaved palm has a variety of uses: a fork, a spoon, a plate, a window to keep the rain out. As they weaved, the family cracked jokes, laughed and shared stories.
The result is an allegory, a myth of her own making: a whirlpool made of palms in which a figure of Maea’s mother emerges from, her brother’s sculpture stands nearby separate from the swirl with the sunflower fishing rod, donning his signature Long Beach cap and Converse Chuck Taylors. Next to him, a cast of his son’s face encased in a jasmine bush that grew in Maea’s yard.
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