Hana Yoshihata

Yoshihata is both an artist and a voyager through her work with the Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS), where she served as a crew member on the Hōkūleʻa and Hikianalia throughout Hawaiʻi and abroad. This experience continues to  serve as her greatest inspiration. 

Exhibiting new works debuting in Watermark for the first time  in a variety of sizes from her Pūlawa series, she incorporates ocean water from Ka Piko o Wākea/Equator, Ka Lae with gouache and acrylic pigments that are reminiscent of the heavens at night, free from any human made light pollution and these same night skies that guided Yoshihata on the Hōkūleʻa and Hikianalia using Polynesian voyaging techniques that rely on the stars as a navigational tool. 

Reflecting  on returning home to Hawaiʻi Island in 2017 through her work as a voyager with PVS is the centering inspiration point for her Pūlawa series. Yoshihata shares that the morning she reached land was cloudy and gray;  from the water, unbeknownst to her and her fellow voyagers, they were approaching Hawaiʻi Island and Maunakea, which was shrouded in mist and clouds, before being revealed. Combing ocean water with more conventional painterly materials, gouache and acrylic, Yoshihata’s mystical works on paper offer dream, fantastical starscapes, which have a spiritual, otherworldly quality, yet as she shares, are quite highlighting the “literal marks created by and left behind from water.”