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A link to the cycle
of life
Works using tapa cloth conjure Papuan culture
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By
Catherine Fox
The Atlanta Journal
Constitution
Published 12.28.03
Jena
Sibille spent two years in the late '90s in Papua New Guinea with
the Peace Corps. Her experiences there, particularly her
observations of the life of its women, are still the substance of
her art.
Papuan women make tapa cloth, which they use for clothing, by
pounding the inner bark of trees. According to Sibille, it is
symbolic of female flesh and a link to ancestral spirits.
Sibille uses the light brown tapa cloth as the canvas for her work.
The cloth, with its surface like handmade paper and its irregular
edges, gives her work its distinctive character.
In a show last year, Sibille drew portraits of Papuans on the cloth
and surrounded them with decorative borders. She takes a more
allusive path in her lovely exhibition at the Robert C. Williams
American Museum of Papermaking, where trees and seeds as references
to women and the cycle of life are her core images.
Working with the earthy brown colors of the cloth and twine, Sibille
creates a lyrical group of works called "tapa sketches." The Atlanta
artist renders graceful "drawings" of trees by punching holes in the
cloth and stitching twine -- a material the women use to make bags
-- through them.
In "Sketch No. 1" she draws a decorative pattern in black ink up and
down the left side. She makes the tree image more abstract in some
of the others, and affixes squares and rectangles of paper to the
surface.
Sibille adds blue to her palette in the panel paintings on view and
uses abstracted patterns of leaves and branches as the background.
The smaller panels are dominated by text taken from oral folk tales.
On the larger panels, she cuts out insets and places drawings of
seeds on tapa cloth within them.
I'm partial to the tapa sketches. The unique character of the cloth
has a lot to do with that, as does Sibille's graceful rendition of
the trees. Despite their references, the paintings seem more, well,
American, and thus less distinctive. It will be interesting to see
how this plays out in future work.
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