GRAPHICS
in Paradise
by Mara Jevera Fulmer
For this
graphic artist, working at the island crossroads of Oceania, isolated
yet contantly in demand, a whole new visual language had to be learned
in order to create meaningful material for her employer, a regional university
in the South Pacific.
What happens when an American woman graphic
artist from upstate New York moves overseas with her husband and two small
children to live and work in a tropical island paradise?
Though it sounds like a setup to a good joke,
overseas employment is usually the stuff taken on by US government foreign
service employees, international aide workers, missionaries, or investment
company executives. Not graphics artists.
Something told me at the time that I should
be wary of the "sounds too good to be true" syndrome. A university
in the South Pacific? What, do I have to plug my computer into a coconut palm
on the beach? Not exactly.
Though my peers living back there in the good
ol' USA of A remained on the "cutting edge", riding the tides of
styles, and making waves in the every-changing seas of graphic design, it was
a tide of a different kind that this American tackled while living and working
in this archipelago of 300 or more islands in the South Pacific, known as the
Fiji Islands. The truth was that the tide that came wnd went daily upon the
reef out beyond my windows carried with it some hard lessons for which I was
continuously learning in the area of graphic design in a third world developing
nation.
Graphics
in Fiji
Graphic design was not something that someone "did" in
Fiji. And the relevance of the art and trade were relatively unknown and unpracticed
except in a few hovesl of creative light. Though the biggest industries in
Fiji are tourism and sugar, Fiji struggles hard to ply its wares on a global
market. In the case of tourism, the markets have been mainly Australia, New
Zealand, Japan, Germany, at one point Korea, and North America. The Larger
or more sophicticated inudstry players will go so far as to hire overseas agencies
to handle their promotional needs in these countries. Locally, however, there
was and still is a long way to go for the art of advertising and visual communications
to catch on and yield its effectiveness.
As Art Director and Senior Graphic Artist
for the Media Centre at The University of
the South Pacific in Fiji's capital of Suva, I was recruited from a university
in upstate New York to run the grpahics and photography sections. With the
grace of he powers above, the mission was to improve the quality of their
work which consisted mostly of producing support materials for the university
and its distance education programs.
The Author,
third from the right with her husband Keith (in wide brimmed hat beside
her), rests with Fiji Museum staff
and other volunteers who've been working at an archeological dig at the
Sigatoka Sand Dunes on Fiji's main island of Viti Levu. The aim of the
dig was to gain more information about Fiji's culture and history.
Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
This article was originally presented in
August.1995 to Syracuse University. Mara Fulmer lived and worked in Fiji from
September 1991 through July 1997.
Article Revised September 1998. Copyright 1998 Mara
Jevera Fulmer. All Rights Reserved
