Paperskin: barkcloth across the Pacific - Queensland Art Gallery

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Pare’eva (mask) unknown
Cook Islands, Mangaia,
(attributed)
Barkcloth, dye / 66cm x 30cm x
20cm / Collected by T.W. Kirk. Gift
of Masonic Lodge, Paraparaumu,
1950 / Collection: Museum of New
Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
This often happens when objects travel; when they are used to mediate new social
situations in new places. in art forms such as music, dance, tattooing and oratory,
there are innovations reflecting location-specific circumstances. The greater the
distance that tapa (or other cultural products) travel in institutional, spatial and temporal
terms, knowledge related to them becomes increasingly ‘partial, contradictory and
differentiated’. 5 As ngatu or masi moves further from its place of origin, the narratives,
knowledge and contexts that give meaning to it in one place fragment and become
less clear, eventually reflecting new ‘local’ concerns, transmitting some key cultural
messages, and taking on new ones.
Tapa may be admired for their beautiful decoration, but they are also a medium
for negotiating the politics of relationships and cultural identity. The further a group
is away from home, the more charged or urgent expressions of ethnic or cultural
identity can become. Groups of people will often temporarily seek out, latch onto and
express identity through cultural practices in order to make sense of the particular
circumstances in which they find themselves. serving this purpose, tapa does its
‘cultural’ work not only through the pigment that decorates its surface, but also
through the fibres comprising the cloth itself.
in the case of my grandfather’s burial casket, the ngatu in which it was wrapped was
a way of reconnecting him to his island home, not through a cloth that was samoan,
but through a cloth that was foreign to the cold clay soil, a cloth that was indigenous to
a place beyond New Zealand’s shores. it also highlighted the fact that, while he lived
the last decades of his life with us in New Zealand, he was of another place. he was a
samoan, a Pacific islander, and the tapa helped to bridge this distance, reconnecting
him to his island identity despite the ngatu’s Tongan motifs. similarly, my colleague’s
wrapping of the trophy skulls in barkcloth was perhaps a means of reconnecting
them with a tangible representation of something ‘Pacific’, a way of separating them
and protecting them while they were in the liminal space of a museum storeroom. My
colleague’s barkcloth wedding garment was beautiful, and the church itself was draped
in an extravagant length of ngatu down the aisle. The dress was remarkable: its texture;
its plain, natural colour; the heavy drape of the cloth. undecorated with the freehand
motifs of a samoan siapo mamanu or the rubbed-on patterns of a siapo ’elei, observers
remarked on its similarity to raw silk, its tactility. 6 For the wearer, the garment was valued
more than for its cosmetic appearance, and reflected ‘a love and passion for things Pacific’. 7
in the examples i have described above, the functional value of barkcloth, as a
decorated object, is less important than its symbolic value. On these occasions,
barkcloth mediates and creates relationships; it bridges distance and time. The use
of barkcloth in these situations shows that tapa mediates actions that are not solely
reliant on the markings on its surface. The cloth itself can be important — the texture,
the memory imbued in its layers, the worked fibres and the energy of the maker.
While we know that the value attached to materials often affects the value attached to
things, they are not the same. 8 The materiality of barkcloth, its geo-cultural origins and
‘otherness’ are aesthetic dimensions that are easily overlooked, but they are important
in the Pacific island diaspora, and particularly in a world where the production of
cultural material is less fixed and its movement more global.
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