PIEAM<\/p>\n
Dan Taulapapa McMullin turns language itself into a living texture in their exhibit \u201cOur Bodies Are Memories of Our Bodies,\u201d on view now at the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum until February 2026.<\/p>\n
The subtitle of the exhibit is \u201cSiapo ma Solo,\u201d or a combination of traditional Samoan barkcloth abstraction (siapo) and poetry in the Samoan genre and worldview (solo).<\/p>\n
In this way, the artist crafts a dialogue between visual rhythm and poetic cadence.<\/p>\n
The works in the exhibit move like a tide between mediums, between written and woven meaning.<\/p>\n
Indeed, McMullin\u2019s poems are not just printed on cloth, but seem to breathe with it, their English lines carrying the pulse of gagana S\u0101moa (the Samoan language), where sound, pattern, and sense are inseparable.<\/p>\n
The poems read as visual fields, reminding one of the Concrete Poetry movement where words take on more than what they \u2018mean.\u2019<\/p>\n
Each phrase is more than a phrase: It\u2019s a shape of vibration, a surface of thought.<\/p>\n
If all this seems abstract, remind yourself of the title of the exhibit. Our bodies carry memory within them, each mark on the cloth of our selves a trace of what we have lived \u2014 and what we pass on to the next generation.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the works in the exhibit embody fa\u2019asamoa, the Samoan understanding that the body is not separate from its environment but a vessel of ancestry and relationship.<\/p>\n
For McMullin, a Fa\u2019afafine, non-binary artist and poet from American Samoa, the act of creation is an act of continuity. The works in \u201cOur Bodies Are Memories of Our Bodies\u201d reflect the poetics of a language that moves fluidly between islands and pages, sea and cloth, the living and the ancestral.<\/p>\n