Materials used: Tapa, acrylic painting / tempera, mat, bamboo frame

Artist’s statement:

This installation, created from natural materials, pays tribute to an ancestral custom story. For the occasion, a twenty-meter mat was woven and two tapas made from banyan bark were crafted. The painting was executed using the traditional tempera technique, with natural pigments bound with egg yolk.

The work consists of two tapas connected by a mat and illustrates a custom story from the island of Erromango, where Amelia comes from. This story tells of a magical underground river that rises in the east of the island and reemerges in the southwest, in Amelia’s village.

In the exhibition space, the tapas are placed at opposite ends of the room, each representing one side of the island, where the river surfaces and disappears. The mat that connects them symbolizes the river’s course and its invisible passage beneath the island.

The story is written in Amelia’s custom language on the mat. It evokes both the flow of the river and the flow of speech, echoing the oral storytelling tradition that is so vital in Vanuatu’s culture.