Ornament sign of style and status

When you get up in the morning, how do you decide what to wear? Maybe you are a true Kiwi and you pull on some stubbies and jandals on your way out the door.

Or maybe you are a high flyer who dresses in an expensive business suit, or maybe you just wish you were a high flyer and you get out a cheap suit?

Whatever you choose to wear in the morning it most likely expresses who you are, much like this large shell ornament.

Known as a tema kapkap, this ornament was worn by people in the Solomon Islands to distinguish their high status.

A kapkap is a kind of chest or forehead ornament which is made in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

This example came into the Nelson Provincial Museum’s collection in 1967 and is registered as being from Santa Cruz which is part of the Solomon Islands, located east of New Guinea.

Kapkaps are generally made from a giant clam shell (also called a tridacna shell) overlaid with a fretwork design made from turtleshell which is secured with vegetable fibre thread.

The most common fretwork designs include crosses, flower shapes, birds and human figures.

Kapkaps from Santa Cruz are often similar to this example which takes the form of a stylised frigate bird.

These birds are important in Solomon Islands culture as their diving into the sea shows the fisherman where to find tuna.

The tridacna shell and turtle shell were precious materials and the fretwork pattern demonstrates amazing skill in working with turtle-shell.

As such, they were worn to signify wealth and status with those wearing larger or higher quality kapkaps showing their superior status.

These objects are still highly valued in the Solomon Islands today but little is known about how kapkaps were produced in the past.

Information on who produced which patterns, where and why is rare. It is hard to distinguish where a kapkap has come from because the patterns were not strongly linked to specific regions.

Kapkaps were often traded within an island and to neighbouring islands, possibly as a way of establishing social relations. As such, many kapkaps of different styles were linked to the same island.

This is further complicated by some kapkaps being traded by Pacific art dealers in the 20th century, who took apart the objects and put them back together in different configurations to make them more appealing to Western buyers.

For the buyers of these reconfigured kapkaps, the object could represent something quite different to its traditional meaning of wealth and status but maybe it would be just as valuable.