Boy with Red Apple _{by Isabella Smith}

Telly Tuita Zooms in from his studio on the South Coast. The backdrop is bursting with colour from floor to ceiling, filled with a kaleidoscope of different materials.

“This show is very black, and I hate black”, he tells me. For Telly, black represents mourning. “Particularly growing up in Tonga. If someone died that’s important, you’d be wearing it for six months.”

This absence of colour is a far cry from his usual aesthetic, which vibrates with bold, gaudy layers of colour. At the same time, it’s hard to define Telly’s style, which adapts to whatever needs to be expressed at the time using a wide variety of mediums including photography, video, sculpture, painting, ceramics, and installation.

Telly is episodic in the way he works. Like a triptych, he divides his life into three chapters. Silent Screams of Memories, curated by Brooke Pou and on at Enjoy Gallery until the 29^th of August, deals with the first: a dark period defined by the shock of leaving his birthplace Tonga to move to Sydney, where his childhood was abruptly cut short as he was made to learn a new language and embrace a new family and culture. Telly speaks about this earlier episode from the distance of the third person, a distinction that separates the past from the life he has created here in Pōneke.

Pop culture and the sitcoms of the 80s and 90s are infused in his aesthetic as much as traditional designs from Tongan tapa and kupesi motifs. The colour black here is representative of the goth and emo era prevalent in the 90s and early 2000s, the horror genre, and nods to the dark humour that pervades the work. Swinging mobiles in kupesi designs hang from the ceiling designed for a child of woe; perhaps Wednesday Addams.

The enormous Great Land of Oz work is what Telly refers to as a mush painting. Made of recycled offcuts, found materials, and rubbish all mushed together and painted over in black, it interrogates nationhood, belonging, and the broken promises of countries like Australia and Aotearoa.

3D prints of a mouth filled with soap, a head going through a wall, a hand wielding an axe line the walls, each one a brutal reproduction of distant memories from his homelife in Sydney. A wooden sculpture softens them, depicting hands pressed together like an offering, harking back to the first time he saw and tasted an apple gifted to him by his grandfather in Tonga.

Telly commissioned multidisciplinary artist Jamie Berry to create a short film, Boy with Red Apple, incorporating historic footage and reenactments of old memories with Berry’s nephew cast as young Telly. “It was haunting to see a memory being visually remade”, Telly says. “It would’ve looked very different if I’d done it. It goes back to what I said before: how I deliberately remove myself from those stories.”

“At the end of the day, this show is about abuse and about trauma”, he says. “I try to make works that are universal, because while it’s my story, it’s not unique in the fact that many kids have gone through very similar or worse situations.”

With decades between this episode and now, Telly responds to these horrors with humour and heart. Now, he tells me, “I've worked hard, I've lived a great life, I've experienced lots of things that life has to offer, and I've met amazing people.”