In Telly Tuita’s self-styled “Tongpop”, time and space are circuitous, like the traditional Tongan manulua pattern he often incorporates into his art based on two birds circling one another.

Dressing as divas and deities in dyed raffia and leis for “performative self-portraits”, Tuita accessorises himself, his acrylic and spray paintings and installations with “crazy colours and materials”. These shiny plastics and ribbons represent his fascination with the “maximalist” approach of pop art, he says. They first inspired him to become an artist after he came to Australia as a boy 35 years ago.

Seated, now, in the boardroom of Sydney Festival, where he is artist-in-residence, Tuita, 44, is readying to dress up a 1927 steam ship in Tongpop raffia regalia, with designs inspired by kiekie girdles along the hull. When festival director Olivia Ansell suggested he “rebirth” the SS John Oxley, he thought: “Hell, yeah.” One of his middle names is Toutai-I-Moana, handed down from a Samoan ancestor who was a sea navigator.

Near the anchored ship in Walsh Bay, Tuita is also dressing six large hardwood poles as totems in dyed raffia and ribbons of singular, bold colours, each connected to his emotions. One, for instance, will be orange, for “ignorant courage”; another, blue, for “calming coldness”.

The bearded artist, who laughs often, explains that his outgoing personality and bravado masks a great deal.

“Whatever I am, there is always that shadow dark side of me,” he says. “There’s always the colour, but then there’s always what’s going on inside.”

The fantasy world of Tongpop was born in part from Tuita’s wrestle with identity and self-doubt. Born in 1980 in Tonga, his parents soon deserted him, and he was passed around three villages among relatives on his maternal side. He says he got his almond-shaped eyes from his Tongan mother, a Mormon who relocated to Salt Lake City in Utah on a mission without him.

One night his grandfather turned up in a van and drove him away from the last of these villages. Then, in 1989, he sent him on a plane alone at age nine to live in Australia with his Tongan father whom he’d never met and his Australian stepmother with whom there was immediate friction. He arrived speaking not a word of English.

Tuita could converse in Tongan with his father, but his stepmother forbade them from speaking the language she could not understand. Gradually, he lost his Tongan tongue, feeling shame whenever Tongan relatives tried to speak with him. At 14, his stepmother kicked him out of their Brisbane home.

At 16, he was adopted by his father’s older brother and his Australian wife, whom he now calls mum and dad, in Western Sydney and earned his HSC at the Campbelltown Performing Arts High School.

“Near the anchored ship in Walsh Bay, Tuita is also dressing six large hardwood poles as totems in dyed raffia and ribbons of singular, bold colours, each connected to his emotions.”

Tuita completed a bachelor of arts at the University of Western Sydney before going on to study at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts.

Becoming a teacher in 2005 was an important means to financially support himself. “I could live independently in the city,” he recalls. “I came out as gay quite early, so the suburbs life was not going to be for me.” In 2011, after earning a master’s degree in special education, he launched a second teaching career with children with behavioural issues, autism and intellectual disability.

Meeting his now-partner, a New Zealand diplomat, took him to a new home in Wellington in 2017. Unable to gain full-time teaching work there, he decided to make the leap and become a full-time artist in 2018. “I had to hustle,” he says. “I’d always made art, even when I was teaching. It was just that itch. So, I approached little shops and galleries, ‘How can I have my work here?’ One little shop in Wellington said, ‘Bring in your stuff’.”

We turn to discuss Tuita’s 2023 TēvoloDiva series, commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre, which staged Tongpop’s Great Expectations, his first Australian solo show, in 2024. The show was grouped as dawn, day and dusk; the way the artist conceptualises the three fates in Greek mythology. Tēvolo means ghost.

“Are your eyeballs ready to hurt?’ Tuita laughs, flipping open his laptop now to show me the videos and photographs of himself shot in his Wellington backyard.

In this series, he plays aspects of himself in costume. He dances as the characters Norma, Carmen and Lucia—all relating to the darker side of his personality—to arias sung by opera soprano Maria Callas. Elsewhere, the Tongan goddess Hikule’o, whose mythology is evidence of the ancient Tongans’ belief in the gods, features in Tuita’s work. She provides him with a “metaphysical” link to his ancestors.

Conservative Tonga’s majority religion holds no power for Tuita, an atheist. “Greek mythology made more sense to me than Christianity,” he laughs. “Also, the Disney characters, the sci-fi movies, and the Marvel superheroes—they had much more relevance to the way that I am.”

Telly Tuita: The Tā and Vā (Time and Space) of Tongpop
The Thirsty Mile, Walsh Bay, as part of Sydney Festival
4—26 January

This article was originally published in the January/February 2025 print issue of Art Guide Australia.