Designs from Pacific emboss everyday life

BERNADETTE RAE delights in the traditional patterns of Pacific works on show at the Auckland Museum

Bold tapa cloth offsets a collection of exquisite kete. Fine mats, intricately textured in natural colours, contrast with the big, bright and gorgeous tivaevae - the embroidered quilts inspired by the teachings of early missionaries and now crafted with distinct flair by Pacific Island women.

Secure in glass cabinets are some rare examples of the little known loom weaving of the Pacific, from the Caroline Islands. Loom weaving filtered down from Indonesia, through Micronesia and as far as Northern Melanesia, before its progress was stopped, probably by a lack of suitable fibres. The examples here are fine and soft, their high value as special items of clothing or as currency items, reflecting the amount of work put into their creation.

Just a few from the selection of wonderful hats on display at the Pacific Pathways exhibition at the Auckland Museum are of traditional design. Hats did not figure large in traditional Pacific societies, although spectacular ceremonial head dress has always played an important role. So, most of the hats are Pacific renditions of the Panama or the boater, some workmanlike and functional in their coconut leaf glory, others pretty as a picture. Then there are the natty little numbers - rainbow bright and shiny that began life as discarded plastic bread bags or skeins of plastic binding.

Together these items fill both of the museum's expansive temporary exhibition halls and form an exciting and academically significant display. The items are mostly drawn from the museum's own collection, one of the largest of Pacific arts in the world, but rarely taken out of storage.

Subtitled "Patterns in Leaves and Cloth" the exhibition features design, says curator Dr Roger Neich, rather than ethnology. The work, in the "soft" media of cloth and clay, is predominantly the work of women. In most of the ethnic world, men work with stone and bone and wood and shell, making items of ritual and religious significance, while women weave and manufacture the more utilitarian items of domesticity.

But the patterns that embellish and enrich these cloths and containers, mats and wrappings, domestic and ceremonial, are ancient and full of symbolic meaning.

Some designs go back 3000 years, to the patterns found on the pottery of the Lapita people, the South East Asian ancestors of the Polynesian tribes. Although their patterns survived only on their pottery at the site of discovery in New Caledonia, tattoo instruments and the beaters used in making tapa cloth were also found.

Those same geometric designs have been developed and elaborated on.

The title Pacific Pathways alludes to these movements of migration and trade, to the patterns of mythology, ownership and the continuing "avenues of inspiration."

The ancient patterns, says Neich, may be regarded by some of the Pacific's people as simple decoration, but are discussed in academia in such terms as "symmetry and balance, reciprocity and exchange, nurture of growth and replication for the benefit of future generations."

These are concepts at the heart of Pacific culture, he says, lived out in the exchanges of gifts between families and other groups at every moment of life crisis, such as marriage, births and deaths.

"Pacific culture is built on exchange and group support, "he says. "Today the exchange might well be made in the form of tins of bully beef or biscuits, rather than of traditional items."

But the patterns still incorporated in mats and baskets continue to reflect and reinforce the deepest cultural values in the daily lives of people - consciously or unconsciously.

*Pacific Pathways, Auckland Museum, April 11 to July 15.