Jena Sibille

A window into culture of New Guinea:
An insightful, lovely look at women's lives in a distant land.

By JERRY CULLUM
The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Published 08.23.02

It's tough to get at what really counts about a culture -- including your own. It's even tougher to

communicate that knowledge to others.

But Jena Sibille's paintings do communicate considerable information about the life of women in the Pacific island country of Papua New Guinea, where she worked as a Peace Corps volunteer. They do this by being successful works of art on our terms, and perhaps the women's terms as well.

About half the pieces are painted on tapa cloth, made from bark by the women of Papua New Guinea whom Sibille depicts. She begins her series with exact, sensitive portraits that capture our attention with their mixture of familiarity and difference. This is the sort of thing tourists notice: women sitting in the marketplace, for example.

But soon enough, her works include not just the faces of the women but their words and symbols. The geometric patterns of tapa cloth are joined by images suggesting the growth of children. Spells and tales of child rearing are written on the works themselves, alongside a recurrent drawing of a seed splitting open. Once we've looked at all 14 works in this exhibition, we have a pretty good idea of what these women were thinking as well as doing.

Sibille has more than satisfied our wish to see strange sights, such as the woven carrying-bags that women in Papua New Guinea suspend from their heads. But she hasn't just left us gawking; by the time she's done, we start to understand why things are done this way. The aesthetically mediated education in which she engages is, after all, one of the great traditional functions.

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