Keeper of the cloth
making hiapo – traditional Niuean bark cloth painting – takes time and energy. First, you strip bark from an ata tree, pulling it off in large pieces and taking care not to make holes in it. Then you might soak it for up to a week or spend hours beating it with an ike, a wooden hand tool which softens and expands the bark.
You can use a shell to scrape it – clam shells are particularly good for getting water out – before leaving it to dry for several days. Then you paint onto the bark, now transformed into tapa cloth, using Pandanus seed pods and ink made from foraged raw resources like clay and plants.
It’s tough physical work that can leave the body aching. So why, having put in the back-breaking labour to lovingly create a hiapo, would you stand in an art gallery and, in just a few minutes,
