Skip to content

Lumlux Art

A–Z

Pacific Art

Art Stream
Archaeology

Pottery as a Map of Migration

At Naitabale on Fiji’s Moturiki Island, archaeologists found remains of a settlement established around 900 BC, including fragments of Lapita pottery decorated with characteristic dentate patterns. Research across Fiji places Lapita communities among the earliest settlers of the islands, arriving roughly 3,000 years ago and moving through an enormous Pacific world by sea.

What interests me is that a pottery fragment can become evidence of movement. A pot seems intensely local. It is made from clay and mineral material gathered somewhere specific, shaped by hands and used in daily life. Yet similarities in decoration and differences in the geological composition of pottery can reveal connections between islands separated by open ocean.

The pattern is therefore more than ornament. Archaeologists can read ceramics alongside materials and settlement sites to reconstruct networks of travel, exchange and cultural transmission.

A broken object buried in the ground can preserve the outline of journeys that left no written map. Sometimes design survives longer than the route that carried it.

https://www.usp.ac.fj/lapitaconference/about/videos-images-credits/

#Lapita #FijiHistory #PacificArt #Archaeology

Barkcloth

Painting With the Bark of a Tree

Samoan siapo begins long before any pattern appears. Makers use the inner bark of the u’a, or paper mulberry tree, scraping and pounding it until thin strips expand into cloth. Separate pieces can then be joined into larger surfaces. Decoration may be drawn freehand or transferred by rubbing the cloth across a relief board called an upeti. Traditional colours can come from soot, tree bark, turmeric, plant seeds and other natural sources. Siapo is still exchanged at ceremonies, weddings and funerals.

I like how difficult it is to separate image from material here. The surface is not a neutral support waiting for an artist to begin. Growing, harvesting, pounding, joining and dye-making are already part of what the finished pattern contains. Even the repeated motifs often refer back to plants and animals. In digital work we can choose a colour with one click and forget where colour comes from. Siapo makes the opposite visible: an image can begin in a tree, an earth pigment and hours of physical preparation before the first deliberate mark appears.

https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/84881

#Siapo #SamoanArt #Barkcloth #PacificArt

collections.tepapa.govt.nz Siapo (tapa cloth) Find out more about Siapo (tapa cloth) at Collections Online - Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
Contemporary Art

A Nation Drawn While It Was Changing

The National Gallery of Australia’s Bilong Papua New Guinea looked at fifty years of independence through art rather than through a conventional political timeline. Papua New Guinea became independent on 16 September 1975 after periods of British, German and Australian colonial rule. The exhibition placed contemporary works beside cultural forms and showed how artists have addressed independence, ancestral knowledge, Christianity, technology and rapid social change. Figures such as Mathias Kauage and Timothy Akis helped shape a modern visual language that could absorb new materials without abandoning local cultural references.

Papua New Guinea contains extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity. That makes the idea of a single national image complicated from the beginning. What interests me is how artists can participate in creating national identity without making everyone look the same. Art can connect different histories while allowing their differences to remain visible. Perhaps a nation becomes more convincing when its image is allowed to stay unfinished.

https://nga.gov.au/stories-ideas/bilong-papua-new-guinea/

#PapuaNewGuineaArt #PacificArt #ContemporaryArt #CulturalIdentity