Ioana Gordon-Smith at the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane

In 2020, as an audience gathered to hear Cora-Allan speak, the artist stood, dressed herself in a blue velvet cloak, took up a brush licked with black paint, and proceeded to paint over her hiapo Our Last Supper with You Revised 2020, hanging on the wall.1 The effect of the spectacle was immediate. Stunned onlookers reacted not only to the performed ‘destruction’ of a work, but the perceived loss of endangered imagery.

Cora-Allan later spoke about her performance in conversation with art critic Lana Lopesi. The artist remarked:

I’ve had to research the crap out of everything, just to find little nuggets of information. Through those processes there is this responsibility of handling, recording and keeping the knowledge, and that performance for me was based on providing insight into how it feels to be me as a maker bringing back an art form. The patterns on that cloth will now have to be remembered by whoever was in the room and saw it first.2

Cora-Allan’s explanation highlights the immense effort involved in learning hiapo (Niue tapa) and the responsibility it bestows. In the act of erasing her patterns, she challenged others to take on the burden of memory. It was also, perhaps, a reminder of how tapa’s material knowledge is transmitted. To learn and remember, you need to observe the art form — and maker — in person.

The past few decades have seen a huge resurgence in many different varieties of tapa. The term tapa loosely describes a range of cloth-making practices found across the Moana (Pacific Ocean), in which the inner bark of plants is harvested and processed into a textile. Although many plants are used, tapa is most commonly associated with paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera), or u‘a, a plant brought to the Moana from South-East Asia by early navigators.3 U‘a travelled into and across the Moana as cuttings; however, to date, it has not seeded in the region. Consequently, the u‘a used across the Moana share the same DNA, unified by a common ancestor plant.4

This is not to say that u‘a — and, by extension, tapa — has propagated identically across the region. While the plant may be the same, different environments have conditioned it — and the cloth it produces — in various ways. Types of tapa are distinguished by their soaking methods, the style of beaters used to flatten the fibres, and the stages of processing that can include fermentation or felting. Most visibly, tapa art forms also differ in their mark-making. Motifs and patterns vary from place to place, as does the mode of application: some practitioners apply pigment freehand, others use stencils, while others achieve large swathes of colour through a smoking technique. This diversity of creation is echoed in the multiple names for tapa. It is known as kapa in Hawai‘i, hiapo in Niue, siapo in Sāmoa, nemasitse in Ni-Vanuatu, ngatu in Tonga, masi in Fiji, uha in Rotuma, and aute in Aotearoa New Zealand, to name but a few.

The introduction of woven cloth, following the arrival of Europeans in the Moana from the late eighteenth century, had a huge influence on the trajectory of various tapa practices.5 In Sāmoa, Fiji and especially Tonga, siapo, masi and ngatu production never ceased; however, on other islands, tapa-making declined, although the possibility of makers unknown beyond their communities should not be discounted.

To relearn ‘sleeping’ modes of tapa, makers have followed several threads, from studying examples in museums to scouring journals recorded from historical field studies.6 The practical knowledge of how to harvest and process plants, however, is difficult to glean solely from studying museum objects or books. Acquiring hands-on, material knowledge has often necessitated learning directly from makers working in different versions of tapa. While it may seem counterintuitive to reinvigorate one type of tapa by learning from another, the survival rates of different practices have made it essential.

One tapa art form that has re-entered contemporary production is hiapo. Aotearoa-based, Māori-Niue artist Cora-Allan is arguably one of hiapo’s best-known living practitioners. Her research began with conversations with her grandparents and visits to local museums, and this visual analysis of hiapo and her grandmother’s knowledge of botanical species offered insight into patterning and mark-making. A lack of contact with living hiapo makers, however, forced Cora-Allan to conduct more research further afield.

Following an initial visit to Niue, Cora-Allan’s desire to learn hiapo led her to Sāmoa, where she connected with siapo-maker Fa‘apito Lesatele. In Sāmoa, Cora-Allan paid specific attention to Lesatele’s process of harvesting. Despite a UNESCO planting project targeted towards harvesting u‘a, Lesatele relied on groves located behind her house. From Lesatele, Cora-Allan learned the cloth-producing properties of different plants, as well as Samoan methods of ink-, soot- and glue-making. Cora-Allan directly borrowed and adapted some of these techniques, updating Lesatele’s method of collecting soot to include a funnel, which she later sent to Lesatele to thank her for sharing her wisdom.

Sharing knowledge, techniques and even materials across cultures is vital to reinvigorating tapa art forms.

This article is an extract from "Knowledge exchange: Reviving tapa through transnationalism". The full version is published on Asia Pacific Art Papers