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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).
Tapa cloth made using a variety of plants was collected by Captain James Cook on all three of his voyages through the Pacific. The locations represented in these published collections are mainly Tahiti, Mo'orea, Raiatea, Bora Bora, Huahine, New Zealand, Easter Island, the Marquesas Islands, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii and an example from Jamaica. [1]
Three examples of tapa cloth made by Mauatua are held in the collections of the British Museum and at Kew Gardens in London. [1] [4] Examples made by her daughters Polly and Dorothea (Dolly) are found in collections of the Turnbull Library in New Zealand and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, respectively.
Highly detailed tapa cloth art is a specialty of Wallis and Futuna. [34] Uvea Museum Association is a private museum that holds a collection of objects that record the history of the Second World War in the territory. [35] It is located in Mata Utu shopping center and in 2009 was open by appointment. [36]
The history of Tonga is recorded since the ninth century BC, when seafarers associated with the Lapita diaspora first settled the islands which now make up the Kingdom of Tonga. [1] Along with Fiji and Samoa, the area served as a gateway into the rest of the Pacific region known as Polynesia . [ 2 ]
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.
Tongan tapa In pre-contact Tonga, women did not do the cooking (cooking in an earth oven was hard, hot work, the province of men) or work in the fields. They raised children, gathered shellfish on the reef, and made koloa , barkcloth and mats, which were a traditional form of wealth exchanged at marriages and other ceremonial occasions.
A tapa showing the map of Futuna. Tapa is a popular art form which is made from the "base" of the bark of the mulberry and breadfruit trees. The pounded bark is painted with vegetable colours and with attractive designs.