Tapa

Bark cloth (Tapa)
MFA# 85.485

Description

A thin, paper-like cloth made from the bark of the breadfruit (Artocarpus communis ) or the paper mulberry tree (Broussonetia papyrifera ) on the islands of the South Pacific. Stalks from the tree are cut and stripped of their outer bark, then the white inner bark is softened in water and pounded to a flat, thin sheet. Tapa is used for clothing, wall coverings, lamp shades, paper, and painting.

Synonyms and Related Terms

bark cloth; tapa cloth; kapa cloth (Hawaii); hale kua; ngatu (Tonga); siapo (Samoa); masi (Fiji);

Pictorial tapa
MFA# 2002.788

Bark cloth (Tapa)
MFA# 99.127

Resources and Citations

• Bishop Museum: Care of Tapa° R. Neich, M. Pendergrast, Traditional Tapa Textiles of the Pacific, Thames and Hudson, 1997.

• Hermann Kuhn, Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art and Antiquities, Butterworths, London, 1986

• Matt Roberts, Don Etherington, Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: a Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington DC, 1982

• Silvie Turner, Which Paper?, Design Press, New York, 1991

• Encyclopedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com Comment: "bark painting" [Accessed 28 Sept. 2005].

• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapa_cloth (Accessed Sept. 28, 2005)

• Book and Paper Group, Paper Conservation Catalog, AIC, 1984, 1989

• Random House, Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Grammercy Book, New York, 1997

• The American Heritage Dictionary or Encarta, via Microsoft Bookshelf 98, Microsoft Corp., 1998

• G.S.Brady, Materials Handbook, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, 1971 Comment: p. 580

• Art and Architecture Thesaurus Online, http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/aat/, J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles, 2000