We know that Pacific Island populations spread out well beyond the islands themselves. Countries like Australia are home to many from the islands who proudly continue to engage with their culture beyond the seas. But what does it mean to be a Pacific Islander living in a wide brown land like Australia? Maryann Talia Pau [...]
Posts under ‘Pacific’
Welcome Signs – early notice
Early notice of an exhibition of jewellery from the Asia Pacific region The World Craft Council are hosting a conference in New Delhi, 4-6 February 2011. The event is titled Abhushan: Tradition & Design – Dialogues for the 21st Century. A key element in this event is a series of exhibitions surveying jewellery from different [...]
Share your charms
Southern Charms: New Power Jewellery Across the Pacific Exhibition in development Announcing a project to reveal new developments in ‘power jewellery’ that bring together craft cultures across the Pacific ocean. ‘Power jewellery’ claims to not only to be an object of beauty, but also to have an effect on its wearer. Most commonly, it protects [...]
Made in Tuvalu, heard throughout the world
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 [...]
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
image 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
image 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
image 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. image The exhibition contains Fijian wedding outfits, Papuan New Guinean [...]
The Kula model of jewellery exchange
image 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 [...]
