Golden and good humoured, Niki HastingsMcFall’s floral tribute to her Samoan heritage has greeted tides of students and staff since the opening of the Kate Edger Information Commons in 2003.

Boxing together artificial yellow hibiscus flowers with electric light, the artist uses contemporary and permanent materials to link the intangible qualities of a Pacific experience. These showy blooms broadcast beneficence and hospitality - they are flowers with power. Part of the artist’s series Fl/Oral Histories, made in 2002, they are delivered already freighted with the inheritance of colonisation. Permeated by a yellow light which symbolises the legacy and continuing influence of Christianity in the Pacific, they encapsulate past and present. Their perky petals point to how Pasifika traditions were suppressed by a new authority in the nineteenth century. When missionaries arrived, the role of verbal recitation to establish social identity and position was usurped by The Word, which was written. Indigenous knowledge got devalued, part of the darkness of ignorance that would be banished before the light as souls were saved. The triptych or three-panelled altarpiece is a format associated with the Christian church. Arranged across its surface, devotional imagery conveyed the mysteries of faith. Iconoclastic, this trio of trapped blooms is an adornment for the altar of art. Rather than leading the viewer to God, it points to two high points of 2othcentury art for its form, combining the readymade of Dada with the all-over technique of an American colour field painting. A three-piece suit, it shows how emblems of living cultures can be appropriated into narratives of power and displacement by museums, sealed in airless vitrines, and placed on display for popular consumption, and so consigned to history.