Congratulating my lil' sis Maria on her application success...

One of Maria Tauau's book illustrations

A big congratulations to my lil' sis (Maria) who's just finishing her Bachelor of Social Work degree for this year and has been accepted into the Master of Applied Indigenous Knowledge cohort starting next year as a 2-year degree.

I'm so happy for her as it continues a family tradition now that my beloved is also finishing his Master's degree this week with his final presentation and with my sister starting hers.

What's so neat about her indigenous knowledge practice is that it will be based around her art that incorporates a lot of Samoan symbols and with my art research this year, I'll also be encouraging her to look at Samoan iconology through malu and pe'a (Samoan traditional male and female tattoo) patterns.

As well as Maria's artwork featuring on some of the covers of our books, she also has some artwork at a local hospital in the maternity ward, I've taken some of her paintings to our house in Samoa with some hanging at our parents' house as well.

This is quite exciting as for her community project she has a number of ways of expressing her artworks and I'm looking forward to her ideas for an exhibition or whatever she chooses to do as an artist...