Harvey Art Projects’ second exhibition by the internationally celebrated Ömie Women Artists brings together exquisite new barkcloth paintings created in the remote mountain villages that surround the volcano Huvaimo in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. Ömie art was completely unknown to the outside world until it was first exhibited in 2006 but has quickly become one of the most exciting contemporary art movements in the Pacific region. These paintings on barkcloth, also known as ‘tapa’, are the customary textile of the Ömie, which have been painted in freehand with a rich and earthy palette of natural bush dyes. Each work is saturated in an organic, abstract symbolism that could only have sprung from a people intimately in tune to the natural environment where they live – a landscape crisscrossed with sites of great spiritual significance and inhabited by the spirits of ancestors.
