Hibiscus Tyger, Tyger: Tabatha Forbes

"Tyger! Tyger! burning bright…" wrote William Blake, conjuring an image of luminous form cut from darkness-an emblem of beauty sharpened by unease. That tension sits at the heart of Tabatha Forbes' re-staging of The Printed Hibiscus in Rarotonga in 2026.

 

First presented in Auckland in 2023, the project examined the hibiscus not as a living flower embedded in Pacific ecologies, but as a circulating image: flattened, stylised, repeated, and exported through textile design-most recognisably via the twentieth-century 'Aloha' shirt. Forbes traced the hibiscus through botanical illustration, colonial plant taxonomy, and the global fabric trade, identifying the point at which a botanical specimen became a commercial motif, and then a shorthand for an imagined South Pacific.

 

In Rarotonga, this enquiry returns to the geography that the motif falsely claims as origin. The hibiscus image-so familiar on tourist fabrics, resort wear, and souvenir economies-now occupies the very environment it helped stereotype. This reversal is not nostalgic or corrective. Rather, it sharpens the conceptual premise: what happens when a mass-produced symbol of paradise is brought back into the place it purported to describe? What is revealed when the image meets the living landscape?

 

The exhibition expands to include new Tyger  LED/neon works and  paintings alongside chiffon scarves printed with Hibiscus ,Tyger  designs. These materials matter. The chiffon scarves move the motif back into the realm of wearable fabric, echoing the history of printed cloth while foregrounding its contemporary fashion circulation. The Tyger  LED works-glowing, alert, almost watchful-introduce another layer of inquiry. TheTyger, borrowed from Blake's poem, becomes a counter-emblem: a figure of intensity, danger, and artifice that sits in tension with the soft decorative familiarity of the hibiscus. Together, they ask how symbols acquire power through repetition, and how they might be unsettled through displacement.

 

This strategy connects directly to Forbes' earlier Rarotonga exhibitions, Takeaways (2011) and Giveaways (2012) at BCA Gallery, where she examined the movement of goods, images, and cultural signifiers into and out of the Pacific. Those projects explored the economics of exchange and the slippages between value, authenticity, and desire. The Printed Hibiscus can be understood as a continuation of this trajectory: an investigation into what is taken, what is circulated, and what is returned.

 

Here, the hibiscus is not reclaimed as an authentic Pacific symbol, nor rejected outright. Instead, it is treated as evidence-a record of how visual culture manufactures place. Installed in Rarotonga, the works allow the hibiscus image to sit awkwardly against the specificity of its surroundings. The real flowers grow outside the gallery. Inside, their printed counterparts repeat endlessly, suspended between decoration and critique.

 

In this context, the exhibition becomes less about botany and more about perception. Forbes asks viewers to reconsider how they recognise the Pacific: through fabric, pattern, branding, and inherited visual clichés. By returning the printed hibiscus to the environment it helped fictionalise, she reveals the gap between image and place-and in that gap, the uneasy, burning brightness of Blake's Tyger.