Lila has painted an incredibly rare, large and oversized nioge blanket—the largest barkcloth she created during her time painting for Ömie Artists (since 2002). The complex and astonishing array of traditional designs she has painted on the blanket were taught to her by one of her mothers’ (her aunt), Joyce-Bella Mujorumo, former Duvahe (Chief) of Dahorurajé clan women.

The border and the irregular square frames are known as orriseegé or ‘pathways’ and provide a compositional framework for the designs. The or’e (path) designs originate from the time of the ancestors and relate to the intricate footpaths that run through food gardens and garden plots. The first mud-dyed barkcloths were simple, repetitive bands of simple vertical lines (either in appliqued mud-dyed barkcloth or painted with dark earth pigments likely to also be river ‘mud’) or representing these pathways through the garden of and are a design that may only be worn by maganahe duvahe (female Chiefs).

The conjoined concentric circles are viojoje dehe, the wings of the butterfly. The stem/leaf-like designs are ije ridimë’e, the customary jungle ladder which is used to climb tall trees to collect fruit and set traps for hunting birds. This jungle ladder is mentioned several times throughout the Ömie creation stories. The three-pronged motif is gojavö hanö’e, the tailfeathers of the red and black parrot used in men’s feather headdresses as would be seen in the elaborate Ujawé initiation ceremonial feasts. The sawtooth lines of triangles represent vison’e, jewellery for the nasal septum made from a small eel bone in the time of the Ancestors. In more recent times the vison’e is fashioned from the chest-bone of a tubor’e (Dwarf Cassowary). This piercing was a very important part of the Ömie Ujawé initiation rite for boys and girls. The Ujawé initiation rites of piercing and tattooing were performed in underground chambers known as guai. The vertical lines of diamonds are the men’s tattoo design of the bellybutton, vinohu’e, representing siha’u’e, the fruit of the sihe tree. Lila explains how in the time of the ancestors during times of tribal warfare, the Ömie male warriors had no food while they were defending their borders in the forest far from their villages so they survived by chewing the sihe fruit, swallowing the juice and then they would spit out the pulp. The curling design is known as odunaigö’e, a climbing jungle vine with thorns and tendrils. In one version of the story of how the first Ömie Ancestors emerged onto the surface of the earth from Awai’i underground cave at Vavago, a man climbed the odunaige vine to reach the light which beamed through a crack on the srface of the earth. Both the vinohu’e/siha’e and odunaige body designs were tattooed on male initiates bodies during the sacred Ujawé rite. The small zig-zag/triangular deigns are buboriano’e, beaks of the Papuan Hornbill (Rhyticeros plicatus). Hornbills are the largest flying birds that can be found in the Ömie mountains. In the same story of how the first Ömie Ancestors emerged onto the surface of the earth from Awai’i underground cave at Vavago, the man then used his hornbill beak forehead adornment as a tool to chisel his way through the rock and into the light of the world. The triangles infilled with black pigment within the orriseegé frames are the Dahorurajé clan design, mahuva’oje, the hoof-prints of a cheeky and mischievous pig that has wreaked havoc on a garden during the night.