SIEKAI — Sierra Ka’iulani

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

(Mary Oliver, Wild Geese excerpt)

I’m Sierra Ka’iulani, illustrating as siekai. I’m notoriously terrible at bios but I am pretty good at...art. Which is probably why you’re here. Glad you came :)

I grew up in Arizona and yeah, it’s a dry heat and during the summer it’s pretty terrible, but it’s also where my body learned resilience before my heart and mind did. I grew up with saguaros and roadrunners and ambulance style water trucks; which one hell of a hostile environment, not to mention the politics and culture. Staying open-minded, creative, and queer in Arizona was much like a newborn salmon swimming upstream. Tiring.
I can’t believe salmon actually do that. Who knows, maybe they’re a little gay.

With two degrees (BA in Anthropology and a BA in Political Science), a very liberal mindset, and a budding toolset in the visual arts - my freedom and curiousity pushed me out of my comfort zone and I moved to LA.

I’ve been here for 5 years and am planning to stay for the forseeable future. Thanks to this city’s chaotic pace and respect for the arts (at least compared to Arizona), I’ve developed a true sense of artistry. It took me years to acknowledge what I was capable of and give it enough room to breathe. This city might be wicked and wild from time to time, but it pushed me to really see myself. Art is a piece of my core, but I’m still cultivating the toolset to communicate in a way that translates. It will always be my common denominator, but the goal right now is to make art that creates a narrative, tells stories, and reminds you of your own life so that you feel connected to it.

This website is meant to show you what that can look like. 

Traditionally, I’m a painter but I am currently diving into the world of concept art. Each character, landscape, and prop has these fine tuned elements that build into this tangible understanding of a world you’ve never even stepped foot in. The whole thing can envelop you because you really start to believe that there are these real characters with feelings and motivations despite all of their embedded magic and fictionality. I love that concept art puts you right into the mindseye of things you’ve experienced but in worlds that could never exist, through characters made of magic.