The recent Wasawasa Festival of the Oceans in Suva was a golden opportunity to meet with members of the broad Pacific community. One of the stalls I admired most was created by the Tuvalu community. The stall was decorated with a wonderful range of crafts, including leis for dancing, elegant fans, tiputa garlands for weddings [...]
Posts under ‘Pacific’
Craft in Fiji – more than souvenirs
As a matriarch of the Fijian craft scene, Seniloli expresses a strong commitment to traditional values. The first value is silence when being taught. ‘You watch! If you ask questions, half the time you forget. Your head will be creating new ideas.’ The second is to keep it personal. ‘I don’t want to be taken [...]
From a hard to a soft place – national identity in metal and fibre
It’s always enlivening when Damian Skinner comes to town. We gave at talk together at RMIT in the unusual setting of Hoyts Cinema 7 in Melbourne Central. It was disconcerting to see the students and jewellers lying back in their comfy seats as though waiting for a blockbuster.
Damian began with his reading of [...]
Floating Land drifts back
One of the most dramatic outcomes of climate changes is the submersion of islands like Tuvalu. So how does an entire community deal with the eventual lost of its land? It’s like that material culture will play an important part in sustaining links after the diaspora. The concern for this in nearby countries like [...]
Australia looks at tapa
Australia’s Pacific heritage continues to grow. The exhibition Talking Tapa: Pasifika Bark Cloth in Queensland has been developed partly to reflect the large number of Pacific Islanders who have settled in Australia. The catalogue makes reference to the prevalence of Fijian weddings in Brisbane.
The exhibition contains Fijian wedding outfits, Papuan New Guinean ceremonial skirts [...]
The Kula model of jewellery exchange
Non-western jewellery provides intriguing possibilities for contemporary ornament. In 1920, the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski published an account of an elaborate jewellery trading network in eastern New Guinea, known as Kula.
Kula entails the exchange of two different sets of ornament. In a clockwise direction, long necklaces of red spondylus shell (soulava) travel from villages [...]
