JEAN CLARKSON 

Clarkson has been a printmaker for more than 30 years. Over the course of her career she has challenged herself to experiment with a variety of printmaking processes including lithography, etching, screenprinting, woodblock, monoprint and stencil. Whether printing on paper or fabric, Jean loves the magic of the moment when the image is revealed. 

Portrait	Gold Fabric

While Jean’s image making is varied and dynamic; an important shift in her work began in 1995 with the commission of the huge Pacific Panels for the opening of the new Galleria at Parliament Buildings.

Parliament Panels

Jean led a team of young designers and printers of Pacific heritage to create the 5.1 x 6.6m panels like the sails of an outrigger canoe. The panels, depicting the iconography of different Pacific Islands, are now on permanent display at Parliament.

This commission challenged Jean to look at the migration of her own ancestors from Tahiti to Pitcairn and then to Norfolk Island and Aotearoa. Delving into Auckland Museum’s tapa collection from the 1700s, she found references to Pitcairn tapa that had survived from the initial settlement. This discovery unlocked a creative history that has been ignored for the more controversial tale of the HMS Bounty mutineers. Jean found a meaningful story in which her Tahitian ancestors guided the mutineers and taught them how to survive on Pitcairn, whilst preserving their own traditions of tapa making, weaving, food cultivation and language.

Pitcairn

With a group of fellow women artists, all Pitcairn descendants, Jean has continued representing the strength of her foremothers. The ‘Ahu Sistas exhibited in Tahiti in 2008 to celebrate the 220th Anniversary of the Bounty’s arrival. For Jean it was like ‘coming home.’  The exhibition opening in Arue, Tahiti was the first time the four Sistas (Jean, Meralda Warren, Sue Pearson and Pauline Reynolds) had all been together. Pauline’s book on Pitcairn tapa, Pitcairn Tapa ‘Ahu no Hitiaurevareva was launched at the exhibition, which then travelled to Norfolk Island in 2009.

Jean’s Pacific heritage is evident in the early anti-nuclear posters she printed in Australia in the 1980s. Similarly her dramatic costumes, created for Pasifika Festival fashion shows in the mid-1990s, incorporated traditional Tahitian patterns with banana bark and materials grown in her own backyard.

Winged Costume	Family Tatau

Those costumes, now part of Te Papa’s collection, have developed into a larger body of work linking her ancestors from Tahiti, Pitcairn and Norfolk with the next generation of creative women like her daughter Rosie Maimiti, whom Jean collaborates with. Together with the other ‘Ahu Sistas, they are working toward making tapa in Aotearoa, Norfolk Island and Pitcairn. Jean and Rosie Maimiti are growing Paper Mulberry (‘Ahu) trees in their garden and in 2009 have begun making small pieces of tapa from them.