Artwork Information

Jo Torr’s ‘Victorian’ dress using lava-lava fabric is named after the famous artist who made his home in Tahiti. Gauguin painted the young women there as exotic objects of desire, when in reality missionaries had introduced voluminous garments to cover their nudity. Torr’s dress highlights the imposition of one set of cultural values over another through colonisation, while reclaiming the costume as an object of contemporary beauty. (Te Moananui a Kiwa, 2005)