Backbone (2023)
Acrylic on 14oz canvas, 1200x1500mm.
Available here.
Originally produced for Backbone, Tavola’s 2023 solo exhibition informed by what is commonly known as Lapita Pottery, a ceramic tradition that maps human migration and settlement across the Oceania region from as early as 1500 BCE. In this painted study, the central form is a silhouette of an imagined, fully-formed ceramic vessel from the Lapita era rendered in a palette of pink and purple hues. The surrounding linear marks reference the dots and dashes found commonly in the decorative patterning of Lapita era ceramics, and the outlines of spinal vertebra.
Through her visual research in Backbone, Tavola started to see the markings of Lapita era ceramics as the DNA for not only visual culture, motifs and forms still used in contemporary Oceania, but as a new timeline of indigenous knowledge and resilience that re-contextualises the timeframe and cultural impact of European colonialism in the region.
Tavola’s work imagines the endurance of indigenous knowledge and visual culture as an embodied practice, the connection to this ‘source’ of knowing as the backbone that supports all function.
The two large-scale paintings on loose canvas produced for Backbone paid homage to Tavola’s beginnings as a painter at Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji in 2001.
vasemaca tavola 