Confined to his bed in the last decade of his life and unable to paint, Henri Matisse found inspiration in the unlikeliest of sources. Across the beige walls of his Montparnasse apartment, he began assembling paper cut-out images of the South Pacific, which he had visited 16 years before. Here starfish bloomed, dolphins danced and seabirds swooped in an imaginary lagoon, eventually finding their perfect expression in the floating fabrics of his late, great silkscreen panels of Oceania, which can be seen at the National Gallery of Australia. "From the first, the enchantments of the sky there, the fish, and the coral in the lagoons, plunged me into the inaction of total ecstasy," Matisse would recall. "The local tones of things hadn't changed, but their effect in the light of the Pacific gave me the same feeling as I had when I looked into a large golden chalice."
Matisse would be in nirvana if his spirit could travel to Brisbane's revamped Queensland Art Gallery and neighboring new Gallery of Modern Art. Designed to face the river, creating a large lagoon of light inside, this $A100 million cultural complex succeeds by placing art at the service of the architecture, then ever so gently shifting our view of it. Nowhere can this be better seen than with the opening Asia-Pacific Triennial, where the arts of Oceania shine on center stage. Suva, Nuku'alofa, Apia and Avarua hardly announce themselves as capitals of the avant-garde. But as the accompanying "Pacific Textiles Project" wonderfully shows, their gentle transformations of tradition are every bit as radical as the conceptual fireworks of the Chinese or any of the 37 artists whose works comprise this regional hothouse of contemporary art.
By the time Matisse journeyed to Tahiti in 1930, the transformation was already well underway. While Pacific Islanders had woven pandanus fiber and painted mulberry bark for thousands of years, fashioning ceremonial objects of great spiritual and aesthetic value, these mats and tapa cloths would undergo a revolution with the help of needle and thread brought by missionaries. In Hawaii and Tahiti, appliquéd quilts (kapa kuiki and tifaifai, respectively) overtook tapa in importance, while to the west sewing was incorporated into the making of fine mats, fringed now with wool rather than feathers, turning these traditional markers of weddings, births and funerals into textured tapestries of national genealogy. As Tonga's Queen Salote famously declared, "Our history is written in our mats."
Culturally precious, yes, but do they belong in a modern art museum? Designed to be sat and slept on rather than scrutinized, these textile treasures, which are typically stacked high to connote social standing, delightfully confound our expectations of contemporary art. So how does Finau Mara's exquisitely woven baby mat fit with, say, British artist Tracey Emin's unmade bed? It was exactly this outsider status that made the QAG's curator of contemporary Pacific art, Maud Page, excited about bringing such material into a gallery. As she puts it, "How can we deal with the rest of the Pacific in a meaningful way, and what could we show? What are the people themselves interested in? And when we looked, it was really the mats and the textiles that people were making regardless. It was always there in our face, but we never looked at it seriously."
Rescued from this cultural—and conceptual—ocean, and occupying a central spot in the refitted QAG, the mats stand up resolutely well as art. In their exploration of color and line, they score a knockout punch, from the muscular motifs of Hawaii, which resonate powerfully with "echo" quilting, and the psychedelic patchwork technique of taorei, from the Cook Islands, to the elaborate appliqués of French Polynesia, which make Matisse's cut-outs look like child's play. But it is the threading through of more personal visions that transform these tapestries into serenely subversive artistic statements.
When Englishman John Williams brought Christianity to Samoa in 1830, he could not have imagined the extent to which it would become enmeshed in the complex weave of Samoan society. Laupule Poutasi's fala su'i captures this perfectly. In this woven heirloom mat, masculine symbols of authority, including the royal coat of arms, are supremely feminized, including a pair of hibiscus flowers added by Poutasi's daughter Tusi Luafutu when she emigrated to Australia in 1991. It's quite clear who rules the roost. Played out in these textiles are imaginative alternate universes, where the deposed Pomare kings and queens of Tahiti live on in the triumphant tifaifai of Aline Amaru. With her kapa kuiki laden with royal insignia, Hawaiian Gussie Bento too unstitches the spread of colonization. To protest the overthrow of their monarchy in the late 19th century, Hawaiian women quilted native flags, which they hung over their beds. These days, quilters like Bento might colonize contemporary art spaces, but they're still staging their revolutions from within.
Flanked by the works of Michael Stevenson, Yuken Teruya and Michael Parekowhai (see following story), they also look remarkably at home in a gallery in subtropical Brisbane. Bento, for one, is smitten with the work of Japanese sculptor Teruya, who uses tweezers to fashion miniature trees from discarded paper shopping bags. "I love anything done with hands," she says. And contemporary art is all the richer for this poignant patchwork of the Pacific.
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