On a recent morning, Big Island artist Bernice Akamine was at the state Land Survey office in Honolulu, poring over a map of Maui dating from 1885.

The maps play a vital role for Akamine, one of 12 artists who received a fellowship from the Vancouver, Wash.-based Native Arts and Cultures Foundation in May. Her art installation, “Kalo,” will include 94 life-size plant sculptures with maps integrated into the leaves.

“Doing the research is fun,” she said. “It’s a journey. If you look at these maps, there’s so much information. They tell you there are land grants here and the award number, and this is crown land, originally.

She can locate where all the ahupuaa, or historic land divisions stretching from the mountain to the sea, were, as well as learn who the landowner was. She likes to incorporate history into her art.

Akamine, who is in her 60s, is a contemporary visual artist best known for her abstract glass sculptures featuring unusual texture and color. She was a ceramic tile setter before getting her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1999. Her works in glass, feather work and kapa have been featured in exhibits across the United States.

“Kalo” is a piece about the 1893 overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani. Akamine spent time at a loi (kalo patch) photographing leaves. Then she experimented with paper, folding it into realistic-looking kalo leaves.

On one side of each leaf, there will be a reprint of historical maps, with the lines resembling veins. On the other side, Akamine is reprinting every signature from the 1897 Anti-Annexation Petition, which she photographed from the Hawaii State Library’s reserve section in Hilo. There are 556 pages of signatures in all, collected from Hawaii, Maui, Molokai, Oahu and Kauai.

Each kalo plant will represent an island and will have enough leaves to include every signature from that island. The leaves will extend from stems wrapped in paper and drilled into stones.

The kalo plant represents the original ancestor of Hawaiians as well as sustenance, according to Akamine. “It also connects us to our lands,” she said. She made a similar sculpture 10 years ago, integrating newspaper articles printed the day after the overthrow into the leaves instead of maps and signatures.

“While it is about the overthrow, it is also about empowerment,” she said. “I talk to people and they’ll say, ‘Oh, my voice doesn’t count. I’m just one person.’ But if you look at this petition, every signature represents one person that was willing to stand up and sign. … All the individual voices become very powerful.”

Akamine said she has had conversations with people, both Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian, who discovered their grandmother’s name on the Anti-Annexation Petition.

“There’s a sense of pride when they see their ancestors’ names,” she said. “I think we all should be proud. Over 21,000 people signed this, not just Hawaiians. If you think about it, it creates a sense of community.”

The process for creating the sculptures is labor-intensive.

She traces each map by hand on to transparent paper, then makes photocopies on 11-by-17-inch pages. She runs those through a copy machine to print the signatures corresponding to each map on the other side. These are then hand-folded into kalo leaves.

Akamine confesses she jammed up a good number of copy machines before deciding to invest in one of her own for the project.

Every part of the kalo plant is symbolic, including the pohaku, or stone, base, which is a nod to Ellen Prendergast’s “Kaulana na Pua (Famous Are the Flowers),” a Hawaiian composition about the overthrow also known as the “Stone-eating Song.” Prendergast composed it after members of the Royal Hawaiian Band visited her and voiced their anguish, saying they would be satisfied eating stones rather than sign a loyalty oath mandated by the provisional government.

The stones will originate from the various islands where the petition traveled. Akamine is using her own collection of stones from Oahu. “These stones I have came from places that were significant to me,” she said, “but I’m hoping to get stones from different islands.”

She is looking for stones from Kauai, Maui and Molokai. A kapa maker with experience making natural dyes, she is also seeking soil from each island to color the paper leaves.

When done, Akamine hopes the sculptures will travel the islands the same way the petition did, creating dialogue throughout Hawaii. The exhibit will open Jan. 8 at Wailoa Center in Hilo and then perhaps continue on to other islands. At the conclusion, she plans to give the sculptures away to civic clubs and other groups interested in Hawaiian culture and history.

Contact Bernice Akamine via email at bamakamine@gmail.com.