The border is known as orriseegé or ‘pathways’ and provides a compositional framework for the design. The or’e (path) designs are ancient and originate from the time of the Ancestors and relate to the intricate footpaths that run through food gardens and garden plots.

When Lila was a young girl living at Kinado village at Gora she saw a female Duvahe (Chief), one of her “mothers”[1], wearing a barkcloth painted with the aheruahe’é stripe/band design. The name of the design aheruahëeé translates as “to paint across” like a line or a stripe. This design could only be worn by the a Duvahe as it was “the first design” ever painted onto a barkcloth by the ancestors and therefore is a highly significant and sacred design.

While the aheruahe’é design is visually similar to Ömie orriseegé or ‘pathways’, which provide a compositional framework to painting designs, it stands apart as it is considered a design in its own right. It is highly likely that the aheruahe’é design, which is the first painted nioge (barkcloth) design, directly relates to the amami nioge (first designs of the Ancestors) called mwe/mweje/or’e garden pathway paintings, as painted by the late Fate Savari (Isawdi). Fate was from the same Dahorurajé clan as Lila. Mwe, mweje and or’e translates as ‘gardens’ and ‘garden pathways’. There are stylistic similarities between the ‘first designs’ and the ‘garden’ designs, as if the source of abstract geometries the artists are drawing upon is one and the same. The Ömie Ancestors spent much of their waking life tending to their food garden plots among the forest, as the Ömie still do today. It seems perfectly fitting then that some of the first designs the Ömie Ancestors ever painted onto barkcloth were food gardens. As a matter of survival, the Ömie are closely in tune to both planting and harvesting vegetable and fruit crops seasonally, according to nature’s cycles. Furthermore, the mwe/mweje/or’e garden pathway paintings indicate that there is no conceptual separation between garden pathway designs and the orissegé (pathways) found throughout most Ömie nioge art.  All of these early Ömie designs: aheruahe’é (to paint across/stripes); mwe/mweje (garden); and or’e/orissegé (pathways) are all visually similar and are key designs in the origin and evolution of painted Ömie nioge art.

[1] In Ömie culture, the term ‘mothers’ is an all-encompassing term that denotes your mother, grandmothers and aunts.