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'Talking Tapa: Pasifika Bark Cloth in Queensland' considered the various permutations of the Pan-Pacific textile artform, tapa, across ten different island nations in the south-west Pacific region. As such, the exhibition was more an archiving of the divergent trajectories of the tapa medium than a critical discussion about its relevance within an art historical context. Curator Joan G. Winter worked in partnership with a number of diverse Pacific communities and specifically with the large population of Australian South Sea Islanders in Queensland who are descended from labourers indentured to work on sugar plantations in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This discursive curatorial method worked to dismantle a number of the museological hierarchies usually implicit in such a show.

Despite the multiplicity of language, style and function embedded within the works, a common thread that ran throughout was the way in which each evolved along the historical paths of travel and trade. Tapa - a material made from beaten bark cloth - is an artform not endemic to any one place in particular, so the exhibition naturally mapped an array of diasporic patterns and intercultural links within the Pacific region. As such, it was equally an exploration into Pacific socio-anthropological history as it was into its art. For instance, visitors learnt that when the initial waves of Austronesian people began to settle the Micronesian and Polynesian archipelagos, they transported and introduced the southern Chinese paper mulberry tree. It flourished in the volcanic soils and quickly made the use of the native dye fig tree obsolete outside the sandy atoll areas ...

For this eighth Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and Art & Australia Emerging Writers Program review, Helen Hughes was mentored by Dr Alex Baker, Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Talking Tapa: Pasifika Bark Cloth in Queensland, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, 12 February - 11 April 2010.

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2010 issue.