Rod Ewins

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  www.justpacific.com/fiji/Adams%20review.html?PHPSESSID= - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 4/7/2007    Last Visited: 4/7/2007  

  Rod Ewins, Fijian Artefacts: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Collection.Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 1982.Pp. vi, 115, illustrations (no price available).
  
  Clarity is the keynote of this excellent catalogue, from the impressive, glossy color-cover to the review of its contents on the back cover.The introduction explains how a wide diversity of nineteenth-century Fijian artifacts came to be housed at Hobart, Tasmania by contacts between Fiji and Hobart through whalers, traders, amateur collectors, and the Hobart Wesleyan Mission headquarters.
  
  The subsequent five chapters illustrate and comment on approximately two hundred items - barkcloth, wooden artifacts, pottery, fiber articles, and a small miscellaneous category.Book design, photographs, explanatory drawings, and attributions are provided by the author, Rod Ewins, a professional artist who was born and raised on Fiji and is now the Senior Lecturer in the School of Art at the University of Tasmania.His presentation is suitably descriptive and factual.He supplies Fijian terms, identifies materials, and describes craft procedures in a manner that makes this book a valuable single-source reference work on Fiji material culture.
  
  Each section of the catalogue first provides a few paragraphs of general information, usually including nineteenth-century descriptions of the craft or its uses.Ewins then discusses individual pieces in an informative way; his observations on quality and provenience are useful because he gives reasons for his decisions.
  
  The book concentrates on barkcloth and clubs, the two best-known Fiji artifacts.In his introduction to barkcloth, Ewins offers detailed information on materials and types specific to Fiji: white, patterned, and smoked.That women produce this material is amply illustrated by his photographs, though he does not mention it.His discussion of the designs as a means of "clan recognition" is especially good.Designs to this day are jealously guarded by their rightful owners and "pirating" for commercial purposes is deeply resented.Fiji-designed barkcloth seems easy to recognize; nevertheless, his summary of eight technical features will be valuable to museums, dealers, and all general buyers.
  
  Clubs were ubiquitous artifacts on Fiji, used by men and women seemingly on every public occasion.Using Fergus Clunie's Fijian Weapons and Warfare (1977, Suva), Ewins classifies and describes the several types of war, dance, and ceremonial clubs.
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  Ewins does not deal with their aesthetic appeal as abstract forms but offers useful comments on shapes and special features.

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  Artists at Work - Interviews with Contemporary Visual... - [Cached Version]
  Last Visited: 6/11/2009  

  hen Rod Ewins, my lecturer at the Tasmanian School of Art, encouraged me to make lithographs because of the way I was drawing in my final years of art school but I preferred etching.

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  Fiji Coup 2000: Rod Ewins notes and essays - [Cached Version]
  Last Visited: 10/6/2007  

  some notes and essays by Rod Ewins
  
  A short series of notes and essays initially written and emailed to concerned friends and anthropologist colleagues during and following the crisis in Fiji that followed the kidnapping, on 19 May 2000, of Fiji's Prime Minister and his parliamentary colleagues, by a group of 7 armed men.
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  Rod Ewins © August 2000, October 2004, August 2005

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  Imagination and Innovation - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 1/1/2008    Last Visited: 3/21/2008  

  Rod Ewins (Tasmanian School of Art, University of Hawai'i at Manoa) "Re-imagining Identity and Re-configuring Barkcloth in Fiji"

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