Tapa
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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);
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