Wallis and Futuna

Art Historical Description

The islands of ‘Uvea (Wallis Island), Futuna and its small sister-island Alofi constitute the modern nation state of Wallis and Futuna. However, the tapa making traditions of Futuna and ‘Uvea are as radically different as their languages; while ‘Uvean is a Tongic language and ‘Uvean hiapo is more closely allied with the ngatu of Tonga and the masi of Fiji to the south, Futunan is rather a Samoic language and we must conversely look to the east and north for stylistic affinities to the siapo of Futuna.

Images

Making Barkcloth

Characteristic Materials

Characteristic Techniques

short bast soak; initial beating – wooden anvil and square beater; pre-fusing; flat-faced beater smoothing; hand painting

Characteristic Fabric Types

Barkcloth within Wallis and Futuna – ‘Uvea

The hiapo of ‘Uvea (Wallis Island) follows the general pattern of tapa production elsewhere in Western Polynesia: The soaking of the bast before beating lasted only a day, no beater mark was left on the face of the fabric, and larger cloths were produced by pasting beaten sheets together at their edges into double layers in the Tongan / Fijian manner. These two large archipelagos to the south offer closer parallels to ‘Uvean hiapo manufacture than anywhere else, and like women there, ‘Uveans also produced large pasted cloths of a very substantial size. Although hand painted rather than stencilled, there was a striking iconographic similarity between the intricate decoration of ‘Uvean hiapo and some styles of Fijian masi kesa, no doubt reflecting the wider circulation of Fijian goods in the region.

Characteristic Materials

Characteristic Techniques

pre-soaking; wet shell cortex stripping; composition pasting at sheet edges; rubbed decoration

Characteristic Fabric Types

References

• Guiot, H. (2020, in press). Barkcloth from the islands of Wallis (‘Uvea) and Futuna. F. Lennard and A. Mills, eds. Material Approaches to Polynesian Barkcloth: Cloth, Collections, Communities. Leiden: Sidestone

Barkcloth within Wallis and Futuna – Futuna and Alofi

The manufacturing method of Futunan sala wraparound skirts shares many basic characteristics with Samoan siapo mamanu and Niuean hiapo; all are produced as a double layer of bast sheets which are glued together throughout with starch paste to produce a thick, smoothly sized and fairly stiff white base cloth. The dimensions of Futunan salatasi (‘single sala’) and salaua (‘double sala’) are also very similar to Samoan siapo vala and siapo mamanu respectively. Thereafter, however, their methods of decoration differ markedly. The tapa of Futuna is famous for its hand-painted, ruler-guided patterns of infilled grids which mimic the bicolour patterns of woven decoration found on the remarkable pandanus garment mats of Kiribati and the Marshall Islands in Micronesia to the north.

Characteristic Materials

Characteristic Techniques

river-board cortex stripping; composition pasting throughout; tannin-rich glazing

Characteristic Fabric Types

References

• Guiot, H. (2020, in press). Barkcloth from the islands of Wallis (‘Uvea) and Futuna. F. Lennard and A. Mills, eds. Material Approaches to Polynesian Barkcloth: Cloth, Collections, Communities. Leiden: Sidestone

Version

Entry created on 28 August 2020