Kāme’o Kahawai is an Indigenous Māhū artist from the Kingdom of Hawai‘i whose practice moves through print, repetition, and material as a way of holding what resists disappearance. Working across small-format publications, installation, and object-based work, Kahawai engages making as both method and record—an ongoing negotiation between memory, embodiment, and the conditions that shape what is allowed to remain.
Central to the practice is the body as archive: a site that carries lineage, rupture, and survival across time. Rather than treating the archive as fixed or institutional, Kahawai approaches it as living, unstable, and relational—held within bodies, gestures, and materials that shift as they move. Within this framework, rest is not understood as stillness or pause, but as a generative condition—one that allows for return, recalibration, and continuation without surrendering to erasure.
Paper becomes a critical ground within this work. It functions not only as surface, but as system: a medium capable of preserving and transmitting, but also of flattening, dispersing, and being discarded. Through fragmentation, layering, and restrained mark-making, the work traces the tension between visibility and erasure, permanence and circulation.
Rooted in Pasifika knowledge systems and queer embodiment, the practice resists the demand for legibility and containment. Instead, it leans into forms of circulation—into the ways stories travel, fracture, and return across distance and time. Small-format works and repeated forms operate as both aesthetic and strategy, allowing the work to move beyond singular objects and into broader networks of exchange, memory, and relation.
The ocean operates as both method and metaphor within this practice: an archive that resists stasis, where knowledge is carried through movement rather than fixed in place. In this framework, memory is not something to be stabilized, but something that accumulates, disperses, and resurfaces.
Kahawai’s work does not seek resolution. It moves through the margins, where memory shifts, returns, and refuses complicity.
Selected Collections
Created from reclaimed materials, What the Ocean Keeps reflects both the visible and invisible impacts of climate change, while honoring the enduring beauty and intelligence of Mother Moana.
The surface is shaped through layered movement—currents carved and built up over time—holding embedded forms of marine life that remain in motion within the piece. Turtles, rays, and small ocean bodies move through shifting pathways, suggesting migration, disruption, and survival within changing conditions.
Fractured lines travel across the structure like stress patterns in the earth and sea. These breaks are traced in gold, not to conceal damage, but to make it visible—to acknowledge pressure, warming, and imbalance while refusing to frame fracture as final. Instead, each line becomes a record: of change, of endurance, of continuation.
The use of reclaimed materials is both a material and conceptual choice. What has been discarded is gathered, reshaped, and returned—mirroring cycles within the ocean itself, where nothing fully disappears, but is carried, transformed, and held.
This piece does not offer a singular narrative of loss. It exists in tension—between damage and resilience, disruption and persistence—asking the viewer to sit with both the urgency of climate impact and the quiet, ongoing power of the ocean to sustain life.
The ocean is not only surface. It is archive. It remembers what passes through it, what settles, what survives—and what refuses to be lost.
WHAT THE OCEAN KEEPS
.A portion of proceeds from this piece will be donated to Pacific Climate Warriors, supporting Indigenous-led climate advocacy across Oceania—protecting the waters that hold our histories, futures, and kinship.
This collection begins from a refusal— the refusal to accept that what is sacred could ever be owned, erased, or rewritten.
This Was Always Ours explores the tension between what was carried and what was imposed. It moves through moments of interruption—where identity, knowledge, and the body were reshaped by systems that attempted to define them from the outside.
Across the work, the body becomes both archive and site of reclamation. Pattern, symbol, and form hold memory in ways that cannot be fully translated or extracted. What appears as fragmentation is not absence, but evidence—of survival, of continuity, of knowledge that adapted rather than disappeared.
These pieces do not seek to reconstruct a singular past. Instead, they return to something more foundational: a knowing that existed before it was named, before it was regulated, before it was made to feel like something to hide.
There is no clean separation between past and future here. What has been carried forward continues to evolve—quietly, persistently, and on its own terms.
This collection is unfinished.
Not because it is incomplete,
but because the act of returning is still ongoing.
THIS WAS ALWAYS OURS.
Power is not something we discovered.
It is something we were taught to forget.
This piece situates the body as a living system—
where memory, ancestry, and energy move as current.
The circuitry present is not separate from the human form, but an extension of it—suggesting that what is often framed as technological innovation may instead echo older ways of understanding connection, knowledge, and power.
Here, the body is not disconnected from the system. It is the origin of it.
Medium: Digital Drawing
Sacredness existed long before it was named as something to suppress.
Before the language of shame, there was ceremony.
Before erasure, there was knowing.
This piece returns to that place—
not as nostalgia, but as reclamation.
It holds the tension between what was imposed and what remains, centering the body as something that cannot be fully rewritten.
What was sacred did not become less sacred.
It was renamed.
Medium: Digital Drawing
WHAT WE CARRY IN OUR HANDS.
This collection explores the relationship between what we hold and what holds us in return.
Across these works, the hand becomes a site of choice, memory, and responsibility. It carries forms that are not passive—objects that watch, resist, and transform.
The natural world appears in fragments—floral, animal, elemental—but nothing is purely decorative. Each element holds meaning beyond itself, shaped by histories of survival, adaptation, and control.
At the center of the work is perception.
Who is seen, who is watching, and what it means to hold that gaze—especially when that gaze has historically held power.
These pieces remain in tension—between softness and threat, intimacy and resistance, instinct and awareness.
Ongoing series.
The hand holds what is alive—
something both protective and dangerous.
At the center, the eye remains open. Blue, unblinking—
a gaze that has long positioned itself as the observer, the authority.
Here, that gaze is no longer distant.
It is held. Contained. Brought into proximity with the body it once defined.
Wrapped in movement and framed by growth, the piece holds tension between power and reversal—between what has been imposed and what is now consciously carried.
Nothing here is passive.
Not the body. Not the gaze. Not the act of holding it.
Medium: Acrylic Markers
This collection moves through presence and current—holding continuity not as something fixed, but as something carried, returned to, and reshaped over time.
Line becomes more than form here. It acts as movement: echoing tidal patterns, repetition, and the quiet insistence of what refuses disappearance. These works sit between what is spoken and what is held—between declaration and embodiment. One piece speaks outward, naming continuity directly. Another holds it inward, through gaze, form, and presence.
Together, they trace a relationship between body and system—between the individual and the forces that carry them. Continuity is not static. It moves through memory, through pattern, through the body itself.
This is not a statement of survival alone.
It is a recognition of ongoing presence—of being held within something larger, something enduring.
We are still here. Not unchanged—but carried, reshaped, and continuous.
WE ARE STILL HERE.
This relief print moves through repetition, current, and declaration—using line as both language and force.
The patterns echo tidal movement: cycles of return, pull, and persistence. These lines are not ornamental—they map motion, tracing continuity as something active rather than fixed.
There is tension between structure and flow. The carved line holds its form, while the pattern suggests something ongoing—something that cannot be contained.
This piece speaks outward. It names what continues.
Medium: Relief Prints
This portrait centers presence—holding continuity through gaze, form, and quiet embodiment.
Where the relief print declares, this work remains still. The figure does not speak outward, yet nothing here is passive. The gaze and form hold a sense of being grounded within something larger—something that shapes without needing to be seen.
Continuity is carried differently here. Not through repetition, but through presence itself.
This piece does not declare. It remains.
Medium: Gouache Paint
Not all work is meant to sit still. These pieces were created in collaboration with community, as part of larger systems—research, outreach, and collective storytelling. They are not only images. They are invitations, entry points, and tools for engagement.
This is what the work looks like in motion.
In Practice
Project: Elementary School Playbill
Designed for a school production, this piece centers storytelling, accessibility, and visual excitement—creating an entry point for young audiences and families to engage with the performance.
Medium: Digital Drawing
Project: Outreach Campaign
Visual assets designed to support statewide survey engagement, with a focus on accessibility, representation, and trust-building across Queer communities.
Medium: Digital Drawing
Project: Facilitation Check-In Tool
Designed as a visual check-in during group facilitation, this piece invites participants to locate themselves—emotionally, mentally, and in terms of capacity—within a shared landscape.
The use of place creates a non-verbal entry point, allowing people to show up without needing to fully articulate where they are.
Medium: Digital Drawing
Project: Paid Media Campaign
Designed to increase participation among Queer, Spanish-speaking communities through culturally aligned visuals and simplified messaging.
Medium: Digital Drawing
Project: Fundraiser Donation
Relief prints created for a local nonprofit fundraiser—grounded in culturally specific visual language and storytelling, in service of community-centered work.
Medium: Relief Print
These pieces don’t ask permission.
They move through protest, humor, and cultural language—holding what needs to be said, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Unsettled Ground
Shave ICE, No Silence
A refusal rendered in color and form—holding culture, memory, and resistance against systems that seek to erase.
Medium: Alcohol Marker over Relief Print
These works move through character, story, and environment—
shaped through both commissioned projects and personal exploration.
While distinct from the core collections, they extend the visual language of the practice into more narrative forms
Studies & Commissions
Project: Character Study
Based on a real person, this piece explores mood, symbolism, and gothic visual language—holding tension between innocence, darkness, & environment.
Medium: Digital Drawing
Medium: Digital Drawing
Project: Forest/Car Piece
A character study based on a real individual—exploring mood, symbolism, and gothic visual language, holding tension between innocence, darkness, and environment.
Medium: Digital Drawing
Project: Character Study
A study in softness and familiarity—blending character, cultural detail, and play into a moment of ease.
Medium: Digital Drawing
Project: Pattern Study
A study in repetition and line—using pattern and text to hold continuity, presence, and the persistence of voice.
Medium: Digital Drawing
Project: Study in Form & Pattern
A study exploring movement, scale, and cultural pattern—layering natural form with color, texture, and visual rhythm.
Medium: Digital Drawing
Project: Narrative Study
A playful exploration of environment and movement—using simplified forms and color to build a small, evolving landscape.