Barkcloth Basics: Interpreting and Understanding Pacific Barkcloth

The ‘Barkcloth Basics: Interpreting and Understanding Pacific Barkcloth’ workshops which we had hoped to still take place in our partner museums, unfortunately will not take place because of the continued impact of Covid-19.

However, we are extremely pleased to announce that we will be moving our activities online and will create virtual resources and content that will closely replicate our original plans, while at the same time allowing us to reach an even wider audience than anticipated. We are delighted that our amazing tapa makers and artists Reggie Meredith Fitiao and Uilisone Fitiao will also take part in this new online content.

Together, we will be facilitating a select number of live sessions in which we can interact with museum staff, artists, makers, and the general public and talk about tapa in museum collections, as well as people’s own engagement with Pacific tapa.

The live online sessions will take place between Friday 4 September – Tuesday 8 September, with multiple times to choose from. Due to great demand, we have added the session on the 8^th to ensure UK-based museum professionals are able to attend, as Monday’s morning session is already sold out.

 For further information, and to register for a place using Eventbrite, please visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/113743273192. To keep up-to-date with the project, make sure to visit our social media pages (Instagram: @pacifictapa; Twitter: UofG_Barkcloth) and website (https://www.tapa.gla.ac.uk).

Barkcloth Basics: Interpreting and Understanding Pacific Barkcloth Workshop

  Venues & Dates:        Horniman Museum and Gardens, London, Friday 3 April 2020

Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, Wednesday 8 April 2020

New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester, Tuesday 14 April 2020

The Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton, Friday 17 April 2020

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, Friday 24 April 2020

Time:                                     10h00 – 16h30

Places available:               10 per venue

The University of Glasgow’s AHRC-funded research project SituatingPacific Barkcloth in Time and Place has received further funding to maximise impact and engagement and is delighted to announce an exciting 1-day workshop, to be held at 5 regional host venues, in April 2020.

Samoan Barkcloth Workshop

Led by the host venue, the project team and Reggie Meredith and Uilisone Fitiao, barkcloth makers and scholars from American Samoa, the workshop is aimed at non-specialist curators and museum staff from local and regional museums and historic houses. Participants will explore through talks, demonstrations and practical sessions:

·         Barkcloth significance, use and history

·         Barkcloth materials, manufacture and decoration

·         Barkcloth storage and conservation

·         Understanding and working with your own barkcloth collections

Each host venue’s barkcloth collection will act as a valuable study resource during discussions, while examples of modern raw plant materials, tools and barkcloth will be available for participants to interact and engage with. Participants are expected to bring images and provenance information of their museum’s barkcloth pieces for analysis and discussion. Resources will be provided to help in the further interpretation and understanding of barkcloth, allowing museums to make it more accessible and host innovative, interactive and informative opportunities for their own visitors. 

Barkcloth Basics

A public 1-day event follows each museum staff workshop; for more information, please see the website of each regional host. All participants are welcome to attend the public events.

Each 1-day workshop includes catering for all participants. Travel/accommodation funding will be taken under consideration if requested. This will be decided upon the discretion of the workshop organisers. Booking is essential; select venues may have the capacity to host more than 10 places.

To apply for a place,* please fill in the form and send to arts-admin-barkcloth@glasgow.ac.uk by 17.00 on Friday 20 March 2020.

*If applying to attend a workshop in a region other than your own, please explain why on the form. First priority will be given to participants located within each region.

           

Situating Pacific Barkcloth in Time and Place

Today we have another project profile, this time from Frances Lennard.  If you wish to have a project, collection or object you are working on profiled on the MEG blog then please email web@museumethnographersgroup.org.uk  

Dr Mark Nesbitt, Dr Andy Mills and Dr Adrienne Kaeppler examining a rare Samoan upeti at Kew.

We have recently come to the end of a three-year research project on Pacific barkcloth, Situating Pacific Barkcloth in Time and Place, at the University of Glasgow, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project grew out of long-standing relationships between the three project partners, the Centre for Textile Conservation and Technical Art History at the University, the Economic Botany Collection at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (EBC) and the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (NMNH). 

The three investigators: Prof Frances Lennard in Glasgow, Dr Mark Nesbitt at Kew and Dr Adrienne Kaeppler at NMNH, were keen to take a new approach to research into Pacific tapa. Investigation focused on barkcloth as a material, through a close examination of the objects in two collections, the University’s Hunterian Museum and Kew’s EBC, backed up by Adrienne Kaeppler’s previous research into the NMNH collections. 

The three project researchers came from different backgrounds: Pacific art historian, Dr Andy Mills, researched the provenance of the two collections and looked at the plants used to make barkcloth, drawing on historic cloths in other collections and working with tapa makers and botanists in the Pacific. Dr Margaret Smith, materials scientist, developed methods of identifying the plant species used to make barkcloth and carried out analysis of fibres and colourants in conjunction with other scientific specialists, while Misa Tamura, research conservator, carried out conservation treatment of the cloths, improved their storage and investigated tapa conservation techniques.  

Dr Margaret Smith using portable  X-ray fluorescence to identify inorganic pigments on a Hunterian barkcloth.

This interdisciplinary approach gave us new insights into the preparation and manufacture of barkcloth, showing how small changes in manufacturing techniques led to variations in cloth type. Historic records list many different plant sources but, interestingly, our research identified only a small number of colourants on the cloth in the two collections; this aligns with research into the British Museum and National Museums Scotland collections.

Reggie Meredith Fitiao demonstrating barkcloth

 beating during a workshop for conservators.

We were fortunate to be able to interact with many tapa makers, curators and conservators through workshops held at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, the Bishop Museum in Hawaii and here in Glasgow. We were delighted to welcome Reggie Meredith Fitiao and Uilisone Fitaiao, barkcloth practitioners from American Samoa, who led workshops on making and decorating tapa in Glasgow for conservators, project partners and students. 

Specific outcomes from the research are forthcoming – in the near future we will launch a new website which will contain information on barkcloth and a searchable database of the Hunterian and Kew collections (https://tapa.gla.ac.uk is the address for both the existing and new websites). An edited volume with contributions from project partners and collaborators is also in preparation. An exhibition, Barkcloth: Revealing Pacific Craft, is at the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow until 29 November.  As well as describing the research project and key findings, it gave us the opportunity to display some of the fine tapa cloths in the Hunterian collection for the first time, as well as some of the tools and other interesting botanical materials from the EBC.  

Misa Tamura treating a Hawaiian tiputa from Kew.

Further project funding from AHRC is allowing us to hold a series of barkcloth workshops for regional museum staff and for the public in museums around the country in April 2020. There will be more information about these on the project website and on twitter  (@UofG_Barkcloth).

All images © University of Glasgow