Mataso Printmakers

This body of work was created by a group of artists from the Mataso community in Ohlen village, Port Vila, Vanuatu, through a series of workshops established in 2004 by Carl Amneus, Jack Siviu Martau and Australian artist Newell Harry. Most of these young artists are from the post-independence (July 1980) generation, and have spent more time on the larger island of Efate, where television, advertising, reggae and soul music have merged with local and traditional beliefs and lifestyle.

While there are vestiges of the indigenous graphic tradition of sand-drawing in the prints – a practice found mainly in the northern islands of the archipelago of Vanuatu, such as Pentecost, Malakula and the Banks Islands – much of the imagery produced by this younger group has been appropriated from the commercial sphere. Sand-drawing is characteristically a linear geometrical design drawn with the fingers into the sand. The sand-drawings are complex, relating to both ritual and practical knowledge, cosmologies and song cycles, and have increasingly been adopted as graphic branding for Vanuatu.