Sulieti Fieme’a Burrows & Tui Emma Gillies are a Tongan New Zealand mother-and-daughter team that work with tapa cloth. The duo’s art manifests their shared passion and close relationship in a hybrid style harmonizing traditional tapa with contemporary elements. Apart from adding colour pigment onto designs that are floral motifs, often featuring themes of femininity, nurturing, protection, and spirituality. Burrows and Gillies strive to utilize as many natural resources as they can in tandem with modern materials. Tapa cloth itself is entirely decomposable, and the glue they use to paste each piece together is mixed with tapioca starch, half cooked until the texture’s right. Their main modern adaptations in creating tapa art include Indian ink and acrylic. Their work mixes can be challenging, confronting and controversial, but always with respect to the roots of the medium and the ancestors who practised it before them. They have received grants from Creative New Zealand towards collaborative art projects and were the recipients of the Creative New Zealand Heritage Art Award in 2018. They have exhibited and presented their work across the globe and sold works to private buyers, including The Royal Academy of Art in London (during Oceania) The National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, The Festival of Quilts in England, The University of Hawaii Hilo and Auckland Museum. Sulieti was recently made an MNZM in the New Zealand New Year’s honours.