9.1 Materials, Processes, and Techniques in Pacific Art

In Pacific cultures, art is often an object, an act or an event that does work in social life: it marks rank, honors ancestors, seals exchanges or prepares for war. Artists used what the islands and ocean offered: plant fibers, bark, wood, stone, coral, bone, sea ivory, seashell, tortoise shell and feathers. Rare materials showed wealth and status.

Many works were meant to be experienced with all the senses, through color, scent, texture, sound and movement in ceremonies. Before battle, warriors used fierce costumes, dance, shouted challenges and threatening gestures to display their strength.

Two ideas run through this unit. Mana is spiritual power or vital force, held by gods, ancestors, chiefs and powerful objects. Tapu (kapu in Hawaiian) are the sacred rules and restrictions that protect mana, often by wrapping, covering or limiting who may touch something.

'Ahu 'ula (feather cape) (Hawaiian; late 18th century CE; feathers and fiber). 'Ahu 'ula means "red garment." Only ali'i, high-ranking chiefs, wore these capes and cloaks, in ceremonies and in battle. Specialists tied small bundles of feathers onto a fine net made from olona plant fiber, row by row. Red feathers came from the 'i'iwi bird; yellow feathers, the rarest, came from birds such as the 'o'o, which had only a few yellow feathers each. A single cape could need tens of thousands of feathers, so the cape displayed the chief's ability to command enormous labor and resources.

Red and yellow were sacred colors linked to the gods. Prayers accompanied the netting, so the cape was thought to protect the wearer's mana and shield him from harm, much like armor for the spirit. Bold crescents and triangles stand out against the background. Chiefs also gave capes as diplomatic gifts: Kalani'opu'u, ruler of the island of Hawai'i, gave one to Captain James Cook in 1779.

Female deity (Nukuoro, Micronesia; c. 18th to 19th century CE; wood). Nukuoro is a small atoll in Micronesia whose people speak a Polynesian language. Carvers made figures called tino aitu, mostly of breadfruit wood, as homes for specific gods. They were kept in the community's religious house, the amalau, or in smaller god houses.

The figures are strikingly simple: a smooth egg-shaped head with no facial features, sloping shoulders, and a body reduced to clean geometric forms. During the yearly festival that opened the harvest season, people dressed the figures, decorated them with flowers and offered them food. In the 1900s, European and American modernist artists admired Nukuoro figures for their pure, abstract forms, a reaction that says more about the collectors than about the figures' original sacred use.

Hiapo (tapa) (Niue; c. 1850–1900 CE; tapa or bark cloth, freehand painting). Tapa, or bark cloth, is made across Polynesia, mostly by women. They strip the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, soak it and beat it with wooden beaters on a log anvil until thin strips spread and felt together into large sheets. In Niue, both the tree and the finished cloth are called hiapo.

Niuean hiapo stands out because its designs were painted freehand, rather than printed with stencils or by rubbing over carved boards as in Fiji or Samoa. Painters filled the sheets with fine, precise patterns: grids, circles, leaves and flowers, and sometimes human figures and written words. This style took shape in the mid-1800s, a time when Samoan teachers arrived in Niue with Christian missions, so many scholars see hiapo as local tradition changing through new contacts. Hiapo was used for clothing, gifts and ceremonial exchange. Imported cloth largely replaced it around 1900, but Niuean artists have since revived its designs.