Becoming the Unaine
/UPCOMING EVENTS
November 12 - November 22, 2025
Mason Exhibitions Arlington
Wed 11am-7pm and Thursday-Saturday 11-5pm
Opening reception: Nov 16, 6-9pm
A shared work by Liz Louise Johnson & Tereua Miracle Oliphant Kaintoka
Unaine (UUU - nye - neh) is a Kiribati (KEE - ruh - bes) word that means a respected elderly woman of wisdom.
This project is a collaboration between Liz Louise Johnson (MFA Candidate, Visual Arts, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia) and Tereua Miracle Oliphant Kaintoka (MA Candidate, Linguistics and Language Preservation, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah)
Exhibition Information
Kiribati is located in the central Pacific Ocean & straddles the equator. It is located roughly halfway between Hawai’i and Australia.
Becoming the Unaine is a collaborative exhibition by photographer Liz Louise Johnson and linguist Tereua Miracle Oliphant Kaintoka. Johnson lived in Kiribati for eighteen months between 2013 and 2014, and after returning to the United States, studied Kiribati language and culture in a university course taught by Kaintoka, an i-Kiribati scholar. It was the first university-level course dedicated entirely to the culture and language of the small island nation of 112,000 people. Johnson was in the very first classroom, and Kaintoka was the very first professor. It was in this classroom learning about dialects and rituals that a seed was planted, one that would grow, years later, into the beginnings of this project.
Years later, the two reunited and returned to Kiribati to create a project that allowed them to step into a shared circle: a love of the Kiribati people and language, and the common ground of womanhood. It was in this space that Becoming the Unaine was created.
The project centers on the translation of the Kiribati word unaine: a respected elderly woman of wisdom. Johnson and Kaintoka recreated chronologically the arc of womanhood starting with pregnancy and continued through menarche, and marriage. It weaves together one lived life through 16 women at different ages.
This weaving is significant. Kiribati, a low-lying island nation in the central Pacific, is among one of the most vulnerable places on earth to climate change. Recent reports warn that the islands are predicted to become uninhabitable within the next 30 to 50 years. With this urgency in mind, Becoming the Unaine gathers stories from what may be one of the last generations of women to live in an uninterrupted lineage on their ancestral land. This exhibition marks a moment in time when the land, the language, and the people are still united.
Swollen Shorelines
This exhibition brings together two connected bodies of work: Swollen Shorelines, which traces Liz Louise Johnson’s personal journey of return, and Becoming the Unaine, a collaborative documentation of women’s rituals in Kiribati created with linguist and i-Kiribati scholar Tereua Miracle Oliphant Kaintoka. The work follows Johnson’s return to the Republic of Kiribati twelve years after first arriving there at nineteen as a missionary. Those first months, defined by illness, linguistic immersion, and survival, shaped her understanding of interdependence and transformation. Learning Kiribati reshaped her worldview: a land-oriented language without a word for “want,” where meaning arises from proximity, balance, and relationship.
In 2024, Johnson returned as an artist to work alongside Kaintoka, photographing, recording, and conversing with families across the islands. While the interviews and conversations were originally intended to be fully translated, the process unfolded differently than expected. That absence became meaningful, suggesting that perhaps the words were meant to remain untranslated, preserving the integrity of the women whose voices were recorded and honoring those for whom the project was created. Through image, sound, and the absence of translation, Swollen Shorelines reflects on language as emotional geography, on how the body, land, and memory remain in dialogue, and on how returning can itself be a form of becoming.
Artist Bio
Liz Louise Johnson is a photographic essayist whose work explores the inward transformations that arise through deep grief and the connections between land, body, and memory. Her photographs capture the embodiment of emotion, alchemizing inner experience into image and writing. She works primarily with film and alternative processes, drawn to the tactile and elemental nature of image-making. Johnson holds a BFA in Photography from Brigham Young University and is completing her MFA in Visual Art at George Mason University.