Julien Creuzet: Fwiyapen or breadfruit...dreaming of caressing the ocean floor.

COMA is pleased to announce French-Carribean artist Julien Creuzet's first solo exhibition in Australia, titled 'Fwiyapen or breadfruit, distant, blue as the wind caressing our skin, uru, a remote force connecting us or ulu, or mei. Our waves speak Tuvaluan; our furious strokes dance in the style of Niuafo'ou; our memories dream in Niuean, together, we count plankton in Mangarevan; we swim against opposing currents, drifting like a stretcher, dreaming of caressing the ocean floor.'  

The show begins with a childhood memory, a breadfruit tree in Martinique, its fruit as big as a football and heavy enough to knock you off your feet. Creuzet later learned the tree wasn't native to the Caribbean at all: it arrived via the same colonial trade routes that carried enslaved people across the Atlantic, most famously aboard the ship Bounty, sent to ferry breadfruit from the Pacific to feed plantation labour in the Americas.

For this exhibition, Creuzet reverses that journey, an imagined passage back to Oceania. In a body of sculpture, video, and poetry that treats fruit as history, allegory, and, in Billie Holiday's phrase, something that can be strange.