Kukarei inakarei / knowledge continuum is a final part of the long-term project that depicts the medicinal plants of the Siwai region of Bougainville Island, an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea. The project stems from Chief Alex Dawia, Taa Lupumoiku Clan, and Chief Jeffrey Noro, Rura Clan, concerns that tacit oral knowledge systems are eroding due to external influences. They saw that one way to preserve this vital cultural knowledge was to codify it through images and text for current and future local generations.

The twelve-metre long fabric panel rests over a wooden rod and gathers onto the floor on each side to visually convey how knowledge overlaps, fades, and repeat. Fabrics, much like images, saturate our daily lives. However, fabric shares an intimate relationship with our bodies night and day. Through the intertwining of fibres, the fabric’s texture and weight provide protection. Combining the analogue lumen process and digital scanography process creates the plant images on the fabric. It becomes a way to embody the critical changes in community knowledge systems and the photographic language.

This artwork not only provides knowledge preservation. It also reveals a community’s desire to connect to a global society for mutual understanding of how their knowledge is inseparable from the natural environment. At the community’s request, medicinal plant uses and applications are hand-embroidered in English to accompany each plant’s traditional name on the fabric panel. With more than two hundred hours of embroidery labour by the artist and her mother, the artwork embodies more than one way of being and knowing for a shared future.

Kukarei inakarei / knowledge continuum, 2018, digital prints on organic cotton fabric with hand-embroidered thread, 1200 x 125 cm (image credits: Matthew Stanton).