Lonnie Hutchinson spent a lot of time sitting at a desk in the corridor – she was banished from the classroom for having a bad attitude. Aged 16 she left school and started work as an assistant pattern grader with Earlybird Fashions – thus winning a bet with her teacher that she wouldn’t be able to get a job.

Hutchinson remembers it was the 1970s – a time of jobs aplenty – and muses how today, when she folds the building paper she uses to make robust yet fragile sculptures, she thinks of each fold as a dart.

Of Ngai Tahu and Samoan descent, she was born in Auckland and moved to Christchurch in 2000 to take up an artist’s residency at the MacMillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury. It was here she made the first cut-out work – Ranchslider.

Raised as a Catholic, she is named after her aunt, Lonnie, who was named after the - London Missionary Society. While taking part in a seven-week residency for indigenous artists from around the world at Canada’s Banff Art Centre, Hutchinson made a cut-out work shaped like a veil and titled The Lady from Magdala – based on Mary Magdalen.

Running parallel with the cut-outs, which are premeditated and slow to make, is a series of performance, photography and video works that are more spontaneous and derive from pop culture.

Investigating her dual cultural heritage, Hutchinson slips easily between her Maori and Samoan identities – equally comfortable and fluent in both. Her art demonstrates the increasing fluidity of identity in today’s art world and her work sits just as easily in exclusive Maori group exhibitions – Purangiaho – Seeing Clearly at Auckland Art Gallery in 2001; Whare, Art & Industry Urban Arts Biennial, SoFA Gallery, Christchurch – as it does in Pacific group exhibitions.

She says, “I’m developing my own visual language and that is really important for an artist. It’s not that I’m copying or appropriating symbols all the time. I use a lot of cultural symbols in my work, such as the kowhaiwhai and the frangipani motif, but I’m developing a lot of my own motifs and I’m starting to combine them with some of the cultural motifs.”

edited from a piece by Virginia Were, published in Art News