Barkcloth (hiapo)
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.An important way to signal the sacred status (mana) of a chief’s body was to swathe it in barkcloth. These patterned textiles acted as a second skin (similar to tatau, or tattooing) that contained the sanctity of the body.
Hand-painted monochrome textiles from Niue are renowned for the loose, fluid geometry of their designs, which were understood to be animate rather than simply decorative. Motifs include a diversity of botanical references such as bulbs, leaves, plants, and seeds. The regularity of such designs is often disrupted by subtle reconfigurations of the repeat tucked within the larger pattern, a formal subversion that creates dynamic optical effects.
Hand-painted monochrome textiles from Niue are renowned for the loose, fluid geometry of their designs, which were understood to be animate rather than simply decorative. Motifs include a diversity of botanical references such as bulbs, leaves, plants, and seeds. The regularity of such designs is often disrupted by subtle reconfigurations of the repeat tucked within the larger pattern, a formal subversion that creates dynamic optical effects.
Artwork Details
- Title: Barkcloth (hiapo)
- Date: 19th century
- Geography: Niue
- Medium: Paper mulberry inner bark, pigment
- Dimensions: W. 70 1/4 × D. 1/16 × L. 90 15/16 in. (178.5 × 0.1 × 231 cm)
- Classification: Textiles
- Credit Line: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gift of William McM. Woodworth, 1911
- Curatorial Department: The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing