Graham Fletcher's work explores the critical legacy of the widespread European tradition of housing collections of Oceanic and African Tribal art in domestic settings. Of particular relevance, to an artist of mixed Samoan and European heritage, is the question of how this legacy might be appropriated and subverted within a contemporary Pacific and New Zealand context. 

I have been inspired by a number of private collections of tribal art that demonstrate the legacy of the widespread European tradition of housing collections of Oceanic or African tribal art in domestic settings. I describe this domiciliary cultural eclecticism as ‘lounge room tribalism’. More recently I have been testing the limits of this ‘recontextualisation’ in which tribal objects are still strategically placed within Modernist interiors, but these objects now function with new roles that compel them to integrate more so within their new environment; the consequences of which further alienates them from their historical function. Graham Fletcher, 2014