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Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (For services to Tongan art and education., 2019) Sulieti Fieme'a Burrows MNZM (born 1951) is an artist and expert in the creation of tapa cloth . Born in Tonga, Burrows moved to New Zealand in the 1970s, bringing her knowledge of ngatu, the Tongan form of tapa, and other traditional Tongan crafts.
Wedding Tapa, 19th century, from the collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Tapa cloth (or simply tapa) is a barkcloth made in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, primarily in Tonga, Samoa and Fiji, but as far afield as Niue, Cook Islands, Futuna, Solomon Islands, Java, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Hawaii (where it is called kapa).
The tradition Tongan fale consisted of a curved roof (branches lashed with sennit rope, or kafa, thatched with woven palm leaves) resting on pillars made of tree trunks. Woven screens filled in the area between the ground and the edge of the roof. The traditional design was extremely well adapted to surviving hurricanes.
Koloa, which translates as "value", is a term to describe textiles made by Tongan women.These take many forms, including ngatu, widely known in the Pacific as tapa cloth, which is made from bark and inscribed with intricate patterns and symbols; ta’ovala, which are mats woven from strips of pandanus leaves; and kafa, which is braided coconut fibre or, sometimes, human hair.
Ruha Fifita (born 1990 in Neiafu, Vava’u, Tonga) is a Tongan-New Zealand artist whose work spans multiple disciplines such as, a visual and performing artist, choreographer and cultural ambassador. Specialising in ngatu (painted tapa), Fifita's art is a blend of historical and contemporary iconography, weaving together patterns and references ...
However, until relatively recently the art had little global impact. [citation needed] Wearing of moko by non-Māori has been called cultural appropriation, [30] and high-profile uses of Māori designs by Robbie Williams, Ben Harper and a 2007 Jean Paul Gaultier fashion show were controversial. [31] [32] [33] [34]
A taʻovala is an article of Tongan dress, a mat wrapped around the waist, worn by men and women, at all formal occasions, much like the tie for men in the Western culture. The ta'ovala is also commonly seen among the Fijian Lau Islands, and Wallis island, both regions once heavily influenced by Tongan hegemony and cultural diffusion.
Tongan Lapita designs were simpler than western Lapita designs, evolving from ornate curvilinear and rectilinear patterns into simple rectilinear forms. [4] The pottery was “slab-built earthenware of andesitic-tephra clay mixed with calcareous or mineral sand tempers and fired at a low temperature.” [ 4 ]