Joelle C. with Timothy Paulokaleioku Bailey
Creating art that relates to the concept of the “Aha Moku system.” Together with the Kumulipo, the Aha Moku system provides the best guidance for caring for the land and resources.
About this video
Joëlle C. recounts how a presentation at the gallery by Timothy Paulokaleioku Bailey — farmer, cultural practitioner, and keeper of the Aha Moku tradition — set this painting in motion. The Aha Moku system, shared by the late kumu hula John Ka’imikaua, is the ancient framework by which Hawaiian experts — fishermen, farmers, healers — wove their knowledge together like strands of cordage to manage land, ocean, and sky, dividing Maui into twelve moku, each containing every resource a community needed.
Bailey explains the painting’s structure: read in quadrants, it holds the four great gods — Kanaloa of the ocean, Kāne of the waters, Kū and Lono — while Maui itself is understood as a woman’s body, and his own traditional tattoos, including the flight pattern of the nēnē, are woven into the landscape. Joëlle, uncertain whether it was her place as a non-Hawaiian to paint this knowledge, asked for a sign — and received it in a dream in which she was asked where she was traveling, answered “to the Aha Moku system,” and was told: you can go.
