A Ritual Formation that Resonates with the Ocean: On Lola Greeno’s Necklaces and Labay Eyong’s Textiles

By Tseng Fang-Ling (KMFA Head of Exhibition)

Throughout the past and the future, in the ocean waves rumbling between islands, the dazzling shell necklaces and the textiles woven from various fibers in various forms play a paramount role. Although in our understanding, necklaces, fabric, and clothes may not mean much more apart from their function as adornments of the body; in fact, they possess multi-layered significance. Some of these shells are extremely rare. It is hard to find them even in the original place where the necklaces are made. These shells have often passed through many trades, exchanges, and long sea journeys; some of them function doubly as currency, more are treated as precious gifts, indispensable elements of major ceremonies such as weddings and rituals of life and death. The shells on the necklaces and the bark fibers in the textiles are made through highly complex and delicate processes including gathering, grinding, cutting, polishing, and more, which require excellent techniques. These necklaces and textiles are symbols of status and identity, and some of them embody rich meanings and values. For example, some necklaces are charged with the ability to protect the wearer against evil people or spirits. Unfortunately, the first wave of European collectors in the early Nineteenth-Century who acquired these necklaces from the residents of Oceania only saw these necklaces and textiles as beautiful accessories for women, ignoring the complex cultural connections and significance beneath the surface. 

In ancient Melanesia, the exchange of necklaces was an important part of daily life. This exchange can be regarded as the circulation of local products between the islands with unignorable social and ritualistic significance. As early as 1920, the exchange system known as the "kula ring” in the Massim archipelago of Papua New Guinea was recorded in the ethnographic work of renowned anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. In the “kula ring,” necklaces and armbands made of shells, glass beads, and seed fibers fantastically circulate between the seas: the necklaces, called soulava, flow in the clockwise direction, while the armbands, called mwali, flow in the counterclockwise direction. In this complex and enigmatic give-and-take, inter-island trading partners are connected and interwoven, and individuals who adopt clever trading strategies gain a reputation for their ownership of legendary ornaments.

Malinowski's ethnographic documents and arguments have been the subject of numerous challenges and disputes. Nevertheless, his descriptions and discoveries provide an important viewpoint on the shells and woven ornaments of Oceania. The kula ring creates a magical ceremony in which settlement relationships and exchanges notexchanges does not only indicate economic efficiency and demand but also provide us with an understanding of the meaning of gift-giving and life values in Oceania. The textiles in these tribes, from the gathering and preparing of fibers, complex weaving techniques, the meaning of rituals to the elements of customization, are often presented as important gifts and heirlooms that showcase the glory of the ancestors and the power of holy spirits. The weaving of clothing also reinforces the commonalities between weaving and genealogy: the lines (lines of the clan) are woven, interlaced, and extended. Similar concepts can be seen in Labay Eyong's work, “My Traditional Clothes are Not Traditional.” Through a video installation of contemporary weaving and body performances, Eyong constructs a network of ancestry and identity. These clothing-like and skin-like textiles and the ever-growing hands present an enormous desire that overlaps and resonates with the body at the interstice of the ocean and the land. The artist looks out over the boundless blue ocean, summoning the cultural stories hidden in the depths of the body and the gaps in memory.

Mountains, forests, rivers, oceans, and coastlines: these play important roles in the cosmology and knowledge system of the aboriginal people of Oceania. In the mythologies of Oceania, the relationship between the coast and the land can be considered as the dual sides of the mirror; We stand in the middle of the mirror, glued to the land and the ocean, thus emphasizing the importance of the interconnectedness of the ocean (shells) and the land (fibers). What’s more, in Polynesia, the human head is considered the most sacred part of the body, and in their mythology gods and heroes fished the islands from under the sea…the sum of all these ideas and intentions provide us with a broader view in thinking about Lola Greeno’s and Eyong’s works. 

To consider yet another layer of meaning in Greeno’s and Eyong’s works, I would like to borrow from Mary Douglas’s ideas in Purity and Danger. Shells and weaving both present a kind of miniature ritual that I call witch formations. In this process, the connections formed with Nature and ancestral spirits bring forth a powerful force, while the shells in the necklace exude a quiet order and the warp and weft in the fabric symbolize meditative purification, implying a turn away from evil and the unclean. Evil and the unclean tend to upend the original order and harmony, and the so-called purification rituals in witchcraft are not only performed to remove “dirt/ the unclean = misfortune/disease” but also to symbolize the reorganization of the environment and living condition. This is a creative act that connects form to function while interpreting the communion of nature and the experience of relating to generations of ancestors through the performance of weaving and stringing. 

Following the path of Greeno’s and Eyong’s bodily creations, when we look at the past and present art of Oceania, we can see the positions of the star, the directions of the currents and the wind, the formation of the clouds, the soaring bird (indicating the land is not far off), and the taste of plankton on sailors’ fingers (indicating whether there is fish in the water). Yet beyond the depiction of form, we also see that these convergences of knowledge let humans and the ever-changing nature overlap, allowing for all kinds of creations to be like canoes, becoming “transitional habitats transporting a microcosm of society reduced to its essentials.” 

Knowledge and culture flow and converge like the ocean. A shell may be the microcosm of an ocean, and a wisp of fabric can be an extension of the skin and the land. The objects that carry the weight of personal memories and imaginations do not just exist as instruments, but as the immersion blends of human and species; reality and dream-like legends. Such a world view exists in the memory and body of the aboriginal peoples of Oceania and Austronesia, spills out in their cultural creations, and becomes the medium that resonates within the souls of the audience. 

1.Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (Enhanced Edition reissued Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2013).
2.Mary Douglas, 1992, Purity and Danger-An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo, New York.
3.Guiot, H., and Stéfani, C., 2002, The Oceanic Objects, Polynesian series, vol 1, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chartres, p.9.