Kainoa Gruspe is an artist from Waiau, Hawaii, whose interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, and everyday acts of making. Grounded in his experience of Hawaii as a place shaped by histories of occupation and ongoing cultural negotiation, his work reflects on the entanglements of land, identity, and material culture. Gruspe approaches art as an extension of life drawing from scientific, religious, and philosophical frameworks alongside vernacular craft traditions. His practice engages with the tensions between these knowledge systems and contemporary capitalist and imperial structures, often through the use of locally sourced and symbolic materials. Treating objects, textures, and processes as vessels of meaning, he constructs works that seek a sense of lived reality while questioning how it is understood and represented. He holds a BFA from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa and is currently completing an MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, in London.