• a portfolio of 9 photo etched images
• 41.5 x 34.5cm (16.25" x 13.5")
• aquatint and embossed relief on Kitikata paper
• chine collé to BFK Rives 300g
• 100% rag, edition 20
• Released in June, 1999
• issue Price: $5,000 CDN + taxes

Oceania, the shimmering continent, whose archipelagos have fed the West’s imagination ever since the sixteenth century.

Observed from a distance, Oceanian customs and forms have been the object of many a mythic tale. Over time, the tales have converged with the cultures of the Pacific rim and the Indian Ocean to create a great labyrinth of odysseys into the distant past. The travelling narration's inhabit the Oceanian objects, especially the invisible mana, a symbolic and energetic charge bestowed by the objects’ makers and handed down from generation to generation.

In 1929, Francois Poncetton and Andre Portier published a group of works belonging to French amateurs and Surrealist artists (Les arts sauvages Oceanie, Editions Albert Morance, Paris). In keeping with her practice of investigating the significance of collection and her fascination for Pacific art - Ozeanische Kunst (1990), Oceanie/Chine (1997) - Irene F. Whittome has explored her own Oceania, taking as her starting point nine plates from this book.

Whittome observes the way in which the common and distinguishing cultural traits of these myriad islands of the Southern Seas are interwoven, and offers a variety of translations from their common ground. The photoengraved images of the tiki, an ancestral pendent, of the tapa, a fabric woven of vegetable fibres and decorated with pigments, or of masks made of wood or bark, all serve to buttress the artist’s acquatint mediation. She superimposes her own stamp on the work through the addition of a calligraphic gesture, which in turn is heightened by a subtle relief.

Whittome’s creative interpretation stands on its own, however, much like the expressive gestures of the dancer for whom rhythm provides only the initial impulse to movement. The goal is to rediscover the secret writings, to reconnect with the original source when the divine had joined with the human.

States of gemination, plenitude, penetration; and shapes - symmetrical, round, strong - unite with distant idols to give motion to these visual and creative zones as they journey into infinite transgression. Laurier Lacroix, Montreal, 1999