(soft music)
- [Speaker 1] We're here in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
looking at some beautiful hand-painted bark cloth.
- [Speaker 2] We're looking at two pieces
that are from the Wallis and Futuna Island group.
What we're looking at is a dance costume
probably worn by a man.
So we have a beautiful waist cloth
that would have been bundled up
and secured around the waist.
And then we have this wonderful long sash,
one draped over the shoulder and secured at the waist point.
- [Speaker 1] So in the Pacific Islands,
you have woven textiles.
And then we have textiles made of bark cloth,
an important material in so many aspects of life.
- [Speaker 2] In fact, we know that it was
already incredibly important to the ancestors of the people
who we now recognize as Pacific Islanders,
because those ancestors brought with them to the islands
most of the plants that they needed to make these textiles.
So they carried with them the paper mulberry plant,
which is the actual material itself.
They also brought with them the plants
that they use to make the dyes.
They brought with them the plant
that they would grow into tall trees
and use to make the mallets and anvils
that they use to beat bark into cloth.
So a paper mulberry, which in the Pacific
can only be propagated using a tuber propagation method.
Small saplings are cut.
Their bark is peeled from them in a strip.
And then the softer inner bark is peeled away
from the harder external bark.
And that's called bast.
And that is the material that is beaten into the bark cloth
that we're looking at.
- [Speaker 1] So there're lots of ways of
creating the patterns historically on the bark cloth.
The two pieces that we're looking at
are beautifully hand-painted.
- [Speaker 2] These pieces have been entirely
decorated with a freehand technique.
What you can see around the salatasi,
which is the beautiful waist cloth,
is a border of painted plant-based pigment.
And in the center, richly decorated intricate pattern
that has been created freehand
using a sharpened coconut-frond midrib.
The pigments are all plant-based.
So we have a beautiful brown pigment
that is made from a tree called koka.
There is a darker pigment that is made
by burning the nuts of the candlenut tree.
Sometimes an earth-based pigment is used as well.
So when we're talking about beating the inner bark
in order to make these pieces,
obviously we're not going to end up
with a piece large enough to form this salatasi.
You actually end up with strips
and these strips are pieced together
using a tuberous vegetable, in this case,
probably arrowroot, again,
another introduction to this area.
Here, what we're looking at are two pieces
that have probably been made by an individual woman.
But when the larger pieces are made,
they're made by groups of women
who work collectively to produce extraordinarily big pieces.
- [Speaker 1] We see very intricate patterns
based on a grid where some of the squares
have been filled in forming these diagonals.
There is a sense of movement and energy here.
When we see regular patterning like this,
it's easy to immediately jump to
this is made on a machine,
but there are small irregularities.
One feels the hand of the artist.
- [Speaker 2] It would have taken someone
an awfully long time to do,
definitely a prestigious garment
and something to wear with great pride when performing.
So if we take a look and profile at the sash,
which is known as the lafi,
you can see that it's quite thick
and it would have been fairly stiff.
So it's a heavy fabric.
Part of the wonder of them is that they are quite stiff
and they do create an incredible sense of volume
when they're worn on the body.
- [Speaker 1] And I imagine there's a kind of heavy sound
when someone is dancing in them or moving in them.
- [Speaker 2] And Tonga, for example,
which is not too far from these islands,
there is a special word that is used only to describe
the noise that is made by a new piece of bark cloth
when it's being worn.
- [Speaker 1] I wish we could take it out of the case
and hear what that sounds like.
- [Speaker 2] The other fun thing would be
to get a sense of what the smell is like,
because some of these pigments have got the most
extraordinarily earthy sense to them.
And where pieces have been specially prepared
with coconut oil, sometimes scented coconut oil,
or they've been worn on the body of a dancer
that is themselves shining with coconut oil,
then they've had that, too.
Really evocative.
(soft music)