O le Sami Po Uliuli II is a deeply personal work that weaves a visual story through patterns and old-school computer image-making. Using a small number of ASCII keyboard characters – such as “<”, “>”, “/”, and “\” – Vaimaila Urale transforms a digital language into a visual form that echoes Samoan mark-making. The artwork speaks to the meeting point between technology and ancestry, where code becomes pattern, and pattern becomes story.

Urale’s practice explores the fluid space between ancestral knowledge and contemporary digital culture. In O le Sami Po Uliuli II, the moana at night is a living presence – vast, rhythmic, and full of memory. The repetitive symbols, arranged with precision and intuition, resemble siapo and tatau forms, yet they emerge entirely from a digital interface.

Embedded within the work are dreams, native fauna and marine life, friends lost, and a sunken naval ship – a layered composition where politics, personal history, loss, and connection quietly surface.

Fabricated by: ENI and John Jones Steel.

Foundation work: StopDigging New Zealand.

Engineering support: Lewis Bradford Consulting Engineers.

Thank you to our site partner, Christchurch Botanic Gardens. 

SCAPE acknowledges Ngāi Tūāhuriri as mana whenua of the land where this artwork stands.