The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

117 Mataso Printmakers When Australian artist Newell Harry, in collaboration with Carl Amneus and Jack Siviu Martau, established a series of workshops with the Mataso community in Ohlen village, Port Vila, Vanuatu, he recognised that a fluid and flexible model was necessary to achieve creative outcomes. Workshops and creative initiatives in such communities are successful when relationships and partnerships — based on respect and trust — are formed between artists and teachers, communities and participants. The Mataso community consists of permanent residents on the island of Mataso and Ohlen village on the main island of Efate. Movement between the two locations is frequent and relatively easy. Younger members have inevitably spent more time on the larger island, where television, reggae and soul music and other influences from popular culture have merged with traditional beliefs and lifestyles. This post- independence (July 1980) generation constituted the majority of the artists involved in the workshops. As a medium, printmaking, in particular screenprinting, is often a technique of choice for collective workshops. The ability to generate multiple prints of substantial scale marks it as a cost- and time-effective means to explore creative solutions in a group context. Its industrial origins set it slightly apart from more technically demanding and time- consuming techniques, such as stone or zinc plate lithography, wood engraving and intaglio methods of engraving, etching and aquatint. 1 In its simplest form, screenprinting is essentially stencil printing; using cut paper stencils, bold graphic designs are possible, which are suitable for packaging, posters and advertising. Resist techniques produce a more autographic image in which the design is drawn directly onto the silkscreen using a solvent or water-resistant crayon or emulsion. As the technique evolved and was increasingly coopted by artists in the late 1950s and early 1960s, photographic stencils and emulsions were developed. A generation of artist–printmakers in England and the United States expanded the language of screenprinting to incorporate the modern aesthetic of collage, overlays and found imagery to produce some of the defining ‘Pop’ images of the twentieth century. 2 The Mataso artists used transparent acetate sheets as the ‘original’ support for their designs rather than working directly onto the screens. Freely drawn, these designs also functioned as stencils when transferred with light-sensitive emulsions to the screen mesh. Each colour was printed using a separate acetate sheet design to build the matrix of up to four colours in the final print. The acetate designs were produced by the artists, while the specific technical and mechanical preparation of the screens (requiring a darkroom facility) was managed in Australia for the majority by master printer Theo Tremblay. With a combination of painterly, hand-drawn imagery and the layering of bold colours and textural effects, the Mataso Printmakers have produced a body of work that is refreshing, expressive and rooted in their particular locale. Imagery used and adapted by the artists includes fish, butterflies, fruit, turtles and hybrid creatures. Other sources, such as packaging, tourist imagery and advertising, have provided initial impetus for the designs. The kastom of sand-drawing is an indigenous graphic tradition practised mainly in the northern islands of the archipelago of Vanuatu, such as Pentecost, Malakula and the Banks Islands. Sand-drawing has increasingly been adopted as a graphic branding for Vanuatu, while its cultural and communicative role has somewhat diminished. The linear geometry of the designs drawn with the fingers into the sand can be complex and relates to both ritual and practical knowledge, cosmologies and song cycles. While there are vestiges of the practice in some of the imagery produced by this younger group of artists, its stylistic application in the works has largely been appropriated from the commercial sphere. Works by Saires Kalo and Herveline Lité, for example, draw on the geometry of sand-drawing as a framework for images fusing cultural traditions with contemporary observations and practice. The contemporary nature of these prints is particularly evident in works such as David Kolin’s Mi laekem kae kaeman 2006 and Weetbix-boy 2006, which are inspired by popular magazines and contemporary music culture, particularly reggae and hip-hop. These freely adopted and adapted images represent the visual language of a generation born into a more commercialised culture than their parents. The strength and vitality of the works resides in the individual artists’ intuitive and unique views of their world in transition. David Burnett Endnotes 1 One of the first collective deployments of the technique was in the 1930s in the United States under Franklin D Roosevelt’s Federal Arts Project. 2 This generation of artist–printmakers included Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Joe Tilson, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.