From places as diverse as Samoa to Alaska, Edith Amituanai’s photographs reflect her ongoing fascination with what it means to make a home.

Since graduating from Unitec with a Bachelor of Design in photography in 2005, Edith has achieved much success. She was the youngest artist to feature in Contemporary New Zealand Photographers, a major survey of photography published in 2005. Two years later Edith won the inaugural Marti Friedlander Photography Award, and the following year she was the first Walters Prize nominee of Pacific descent. Her works have exhibited extensively both around New Zealand and abroad, and belong in a number of public and private

Edith’s process of constructing images could be considered anthropological studies. Her practice questions how notions of home migrate from one place to another, as well as from one generation to the next. Domestic interiors in particular feature as transitional sites; places where occupants gather together select objects of varied cultural significance. In investigating interiors, Edith has photographed homes in Samoa, New Zealand and the United States of America. More recently, Edith trained her lens on the street. From the end of my driveway, 2009-1010, looked at the road as a site of freedom for children walking between home and school. Edith ventured further into the community with Ranui 135, a series of photographs named after her local bus route. Using a mobile portrait booth, Edith photographed young people at a range of community events, including a Sunday school ball and neighbourhood barbeque.

Stories of migration are prominent in Edith’s work. After receiving a Creative New Zealand grant in 2006, Edith travelled to Europe to photograph Samoan rugby players living in Italy and France. Her resulting series, Dejeuner, includes portraits of the young sportsmen on the rugby field along with photographs of the family homes the players have left behind. Together, these images tell the two sides of migration; those who seek better lives in foreign lands, and those who stay behind. The interiors, in particular, emanate a sense of longing. The House of Tiatia, 2007, for instance, is brim with objects that evoke an absent son: a framed rugby jersey, casually hung medals and club photographs lined up in a row stand in his place. Dejeuner was first exhibited at Anna Miles Gallery in 2007. It was also shown at the Auckland Art Gallery in 2008, when it was shortlisted for the bi-annual Walters Prize, New Zealand’s pre-eminent art award.

Edith has participated in a number of high profile group exhibitions including Urban Legends Train Journey as a part of Urbanesia, various public spaces across Auckland, 2016; Pacifique (S) Contemporain, Rouen and Le Havre, France, 2015; Freedom Farmers, Auckland Art Gallery, 2013; Contact - Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany, 2012; Samoa Contemporary, Pataka, Porirua, 2008 and The Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, 2008; Dateline: contemporary Art from the Pacific, NBK, Berlin, Germany, 2007-2008; and Le Folauga, Auckland Museum, 2007 and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, 2007. Edith received her Masters of Fine Art at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. She is represented by Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland and Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington.