ABSTRACT
Pacific artworks are well known for their capacity simultaneously to contain and elicit all prior and future works. ‘Templates’ are taken to capture the technical and material means that secure the generativity and reproductivity of artworks and to involve geometric and mathematical specifications of some kind, such as the graphic layout and geometric design of ‘fore-’ and ‘back-ground’ in Australian Aboriginal bark-painting, or the mathematically precise refiguration of the body in Kula canoe-prows. Where carving from wood predominates in the ritual arts, as in the north of New Ireland, the idea of the knot as the figural frame for technical knowledge appears far-fetched at first glance. The entangling of carved planes, common to Collins’s knot-sculptures, is strikingly reminiscent of the figural qualities of malanggan.
