Teone | Clothplant

A SELECTION of PAINTINGS FROM

THE CLOTHPLANT SERIES

Setting Out - acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas 80 x 80

Canoes - acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas 90 x 70

Breadfruit - acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas 80 x 70

One Canoe - acrylic, charcoal on canvas 80 x 70

Outriggers - acrylic, charcoal on canvas 80 x 70

CATALOGUE NOTES - My great, great, great, great grandmother was a Matavai chief's daughter and blood relative of the High Chief Tu of Pare. She was a Ra'atiran (Tahitian) woman named Mauatua, (Mountain Spirit). An astonishingly tall and powerful woman with great beauty, she married Fletcher Christian, the Master's Mate of HMS Bounty in 1788 in a traditional Polynesian ceremony whilst still in Tahiti. She was twenty four years old.

Arriving at Pitcairn Island in January 1790, the crew of the Bounty discovered that the island had been previously inhabited by an earlier Polynesian civilisation from the many artefacts that were left (and still exist) on the island. There were a large number of stone gods guarding sacred sites, Polynesian designs and cliff-face carvings of men and animals, several earth ovens, many stone adzes, gouges, and burial sites found to be containing skeletons.

Mauatua changed her name to Maimiti, (following a traditional Tahition custom to elect a name change at significant life junctions) and she was subsequently named Isabella as a Christianised choice, and also known as Mainmast or the abbreviated "Maimas" due to her tall stature and proud bearing. She was devoted to her husband until his death in a massacre on Pitcairn Island on the 20th September 1793. In spite of the extremely difficult and violent circumstances of surviving on Pitcairn, she managed to raise her children and live a long and active life.

The women created a haven upon that island, establishing market gardens, catching fish, building canoes and crafting with traditional tools brought from Tahiti, tools that had been handed down from mother to daughter, and they prepared their food in traditional ways, cooking in Polynesian stone ovens, preparing yams, taro, bananas, coconuts, fish and pig, sea-bird and goat, eating twice daily, at noon and at dusk. All of their clothing, blankets and wraps were traditionally made from tapa, a soft, fibrous cloth beaten from the inner layers of native mulberry bark. It was known as the cloth plant.

Due to overcrowding, many of the Pitcairn Islanders eventually moved to Norfolk Island where my mother was born, delivered by her Auntie Gordie at home on their farm. My mother is the youngest of three sisters, and at her arrival, she entered a wide world of women,... two sisters, a mother, grandmother, great aunt and nine aunties, and one loving dad.

My mother's way is a way of healing that flows in and around a sea of spirit that guides and journeys us through all the many incredible events and changes in our lives. This is an ancient way, handed on in the nectar-songs that stirred and arose in the hearts and mouths of mothers with babies. These songs are passed down from generations of women filled with their own nectars, women fully nourished, deeply into the bonesongs of life, proudly borne on those strong and solid bones, properly formed and fed by the nectar-songs of their own mothers and aunts and grandmothers, nectar-songs that entered their ears and minds and souls, causing their soft and yielding baby bones to resonate with pure tones, cascading vibrations and cellular instructions for development, enabling them to claim a place within the wheel of life.

I know that I am blessed by the precious gifts and the tools that my mother and all auwas salan have handed on to me. I see that encoded in the blood of me is a richness of stories that I am growing to appreciate more and more every day. excerpted from Gaia's Mouth 2005 ©TR