Female artists from around the Pacific region are reviving lost cultural art forms and reinventing creative traditions that have existed for generations, reports Indira Moala for Radio New Zealand International.

They are among the many artists, experts and academics who have travelled from across the globe to attend the 12th Pacific Arts International Symposium being held in Auckland this week.

From the first day of the symposium, the irregular tapping of the ‘au ta – an instrument used for tattooing in Samoan culture – could be heard like a constant hum throughout events centre.

The live tattooing ceremony of Yolande Ah Chong, took place in the middle of the centre with supporters observing as she received her Malu, a Samoan tattoo covering both thighs, given to honourable women.

On the other side of the room was another female model being tattooed by Papua New Guinean artist Julia Page’au Gray.

Together with other Melanesian female artists, Gray has been working to rediscover the practise of female tattooing, an art form now dead in some parts of Melanesia, such as Fiji.

She hoped it could one day be revived.

“The women in all Melanesian cultures have been the most hard-done by. We’ve been silenced. But we’re now at a point where we can take that back, own our marks and empower our women so they have a voice,” she said.

“When a Fijian woman picks up the tools and starts to tattoo, then you will have your revival.”

Among the work on display was a six meter long tapa cloth created by Tongan artist Tui Gillies and her mother Sulieti Fieme’a Burrows.

Their innovative designs took a turn from tradition and for the first time included coloured pictures of village life, never before seen on traditional tapa cloth.

Gillies explained that the art form, which is no longer practised in her mother’s village, is dear to her.

“I actually grew up in a bedroom and my whole room was covered in my grandmother’s tapa cloth. Like, she had made all this tapa and it was completely – it was like a tapa womb,” she said.

“It felt natural to me, like it was a healing cloth. It was very warm and it just felt right to go with tapa cloth.”

Other examples of innovative work included dresses made from bilums, a traditionally woven bag in Papua New Guinea, used for carrying babies and food.

Designer Florence Jaukae Kamel admitted that changing a custom tradition was not received well at first, by her own people.

“They think the idea was like, I was insane or something. Like, ‘what’s happened to Florence? What is she trying to do? Get in something that we carry a food and baby in?,”

“It’s kastom (custom), you know. Its hard, you can’t do it. But I just did it.”

Her dream of seeing her garments featured on a runway in a western country came true in 2014 when she had the opportunity to collaborate with design students from the Parsons School of Design in New York and the London Fashion University.

“The bilum did went out there and when they asked me ‘ah Florence, you got something to say?

“I said, ‘look, I never went to a fashion university, I was never a fashion designer I was just somebody who rowed from the village,” Kamel said.

“But bilum has come from the rainforest of Papua New Guinea out into the runway of New York and I’m so proud of it.”

The symposium co-ordinator, Bethany Edmunds, pointed out that the artwork has unravelled interesting connections to each part of the region.

“Material culture is rich in evidence of connections that go beyond the written histories,”

“Through artforms and making practises, you can start to trace some of those lineages that go out beyond just Aotearoa or just Hawai‘i and start to make those connections.”

The final presentations for the International Symposium end this week at the Mangere Arts Centre in Auckland. -IM