Bark-cloth drifting: The migration of Pacific woodblock prints, arising hybrid forms and digital counterparts

Abstract

This paper explores how indigenous pacific forms of block-printmaking are evolving through a process of migration and hybridisation, with other reprographic technologies.

Hand-tool printing methods across the Pacific consist of hand pressing or the burnishing of carved wood-blocks with a baren, to transfer ink to paper made from the mulberry tree. Printing with blocks of carved wood on bark-papers has been established for many centuries. These traditional technologies are practices that meet the strict limits of island economies for sustainable practice.

This paper will explore the Pacific block-print development and its influence on contemporary fine arts across the Pacific, through the collections of the Museum of Te Papa, Tongarewa, Wellington and the National Museum of Arts, Tokyo. There will be a close examination of the variations in the print form that arose from migration and the adoption of practice by new communities, as islands became colonised across the Pacific. This paper will explore how different conditions created opportunities for diversity, comparing practices from Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Niue, New Zealand and Japan.

The journey concludes with a review of how these indigenous hand-technologies are interfacing with digital or other reproductive media, and asks whether these last hybrids have shed their original cultural and craft contexts, in place of new relationships for expanded territories.