Olga Hedwig Janice Wilson

Candles in the dark always evoke for me a certain sense of reverence and contemplation. Irrespective of media, my work always seeks to convey an art outcome that is most sincerely from my interior world. This particular work uses light as a form of supplication, pleading and mercy. It places me as the performer in the position of having to work according to the only light available. I am at the mercy of the dark as well as the light.

Olga Hedwig Janice Krause also known as Leafa Wilson is a New Zealand-born Samoan whose art practice spans 34 years. She known mostly as a multi-media performance artist. Wilson has been a curator of art at Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand for over 16 years, and has had an independent curatorial, writing and consultancy career for since 2001. Much of her life has revolved around art in a multiplicity of forms. 

Multimedia performance artist, curator and art writer, Leafa Wilson (b. 1966, Aotearoa New Zealand) has been making art for over thirty years.
Wilson performs her lifelong, ongoing work with the use of her Samoan and married names, Leafa Janice Wilson, and the name that she was born with Olga Hedwig Janice Krause. The use of both names when performing and in written documentation is a conscious act of acknowledging her brown body as a site of constant contest and discursivity between dual epistemologies of Polynesian theory of TA-VA (Time-Space) and Western notions philosophical concerns around habitus and being (Bourdieu and Sartre). Wilson and Krause has long been a practitioner using metaphoric dualisms such as light and dark, protection and vulnerability, and death and life, in her work.

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