Description:

With contributions from over 120 artists, curators and community voices, Pacific Arts Aotearoa is the first comprehensive history of Pacific art published in Aotearoa New Zealand. The project, led and edited by Lana Lopesi, began as an online initiative. Its success and relevance saw Creative New Zealand and Penguin Random House come onboard to plan the publication of a further 70 stories in a large-format, 560-plus page illustrated volume.

Pacific communities have excelled within the New Zealand art canon, however the telling and recording of their stories is scarce. When their stories are documented, they are often not recounted in the artist’s own voice. This publication presented an opportunity to collect these histories, told by the artists in their own words, in one place.

Inherent to this is a challenge—speaking to and representing a broad and diverse set of visual languages. Creating something that feels familiar and undeniably Pacific, without privileging one cultural identity; and going beyond surface application to distil from deeper principles the essence of a Moana design language.

For the initial online project, we designed a unique typeface, and this was carried through to the publication as a visual motif and continuation of the kaupapa. Rather than featuring a specific group or artist, an abstracted glyph created from the shapes of the typeface sits on the cover, pointing to the collective effort of the entire project. This glyph, repeated across chapter titles, extends out to the book’s edges—the borders, which call to the Moana significance of demarcation.

From the foundations of the page, the grid references structures and patterns found in ngātu, hiapo, siapo and other tapa traditions. Much like the many different kinds of kupesi (pattern making) found throughout Pacific culture—cloth, lashing and carving—this allowed the text column to shift throughout the book, an acknowledgement of the diversity of material expression across the Moana. The typography contrasts Signifier and Agipo to weave two layered narratives. Signifier, set in a shifting editorial style, connotes a subjective singular voice that guides you through the stories. Agipo, a san-serif in solid double columns, suggests a more objective encyclopaedic tone to unify the histories and cast it into canon.

Throughout, colours are drawn from the tīvaevae tataura (embroided quilt) made by Mi‘i Quarter for TV2 in 1996, and a metaphor for the project itself—a cultural moment in which customary practice meets a contemporary expression. In order to fulfil the marketing requirements for the book’s cover, we used a waistband—a tongue-in-cheek nod to the ta'ovala (Tongan mat worn around the waist)—which allowed us to consider the book’s presence and existence outside of a temporary retail context and design it as a pure cultural, graphic and object expression. Throughout the Moana, significant reverence is held for material expressions of culture. As a continuation of this indigenous framework, Pacific Arts Aotearoa is designed to align with those makers, and to have a sculptural and aesthetic quality that can sit inside the home as an object to be lived with.