Lepau painted barkcloth, Santa Cruz Islands, Solomon Islands. Kiwa Art collection. 1560 × 330–370 mm. Among the most distinctive barkcloths of the western Pacific are the narrow painted cloths known as lepau, made in the Santa Cruz Islands of the southeastern Solomon Islands. This example was recently acquired by Kiwa Art. Its surface is organised into two long columns of geometric decoration separated by a narrow undecorated strip. Within them are densely worked fields of ch

A Guide to Pacific Bark Cloth, Its History, Cultural Significance and Regional Styles By Kiwa Art – Specialists in Māori and Pacific Art since 1989 Tapa cloth is one of the Pacific's oldest and most extraordinary art forms — created not by weaving, but by transforming the soft inner bark of a tree into cloth through hours of patient beating. Long before European contact, the sound of wooden mallets striking bark echoed through villages from Hawaiʻi to Fiji, marking a craft pa

Mick Pendergrast circa 2000 Few books on Māori material culture have had the quiet, lasting influence of Raranga Whakairo: Māori Plaiting Patterns by Mick Pendergrast. First published in 1984, Raranga Whakairo documented more than 200 traditional Māori plaiting patterns gathered from woven objects throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. For weavers, artists, museums, libraries, collectors and students of Māori fibre arts, it became one of the essential reference works on raranga, ke