Fate has painted a highly significant barkcloth known as Amami nioge, the cloth of the Ancestors. She explains, “This is how the first ancestors painted in the beginning… my mother showed me everything.”

The border and the straight lines that run through the work are known as orriseegé (paths/pathways) and provide a compositional framework for the designs.

The zig-zags seen in the work are one of the earliest known barkcloth painting designs Fate calls “the design of our Ancestors”. Interestingly, this design strongly resembles dahoru’e, the design of the Ömie mountains. The spaces between the zig-zags are infilled with a cross-hatching design called mwe, representing food gardens. Other paintings by Fate of mwe, mweje and or’e (gardens or paths through the garden) have revealed that the lines commonly seen running throughout Ömie women’s paintings known as orriseegé or ‘pathways’, actually originate from the ancient mwe/mweje/or’e garden designs.

Another special design of Fate’s is the smaller zig-zag design that can be seen inside the orriseegé. It is known as moköjö bineb’e, the red chest feathers of the parrot. The moköjö bird appears in several Dahorurajé and Sahuoté clan stories. The birds often appear as a flock in the form of a cloud, stealing children or collecting the deceased and carrying them/delivering them to the Ancestor Spirit village high on the volcano Huvaimo. In the old stories, the parrots also commonly communicate and bring messages of warning to Ömie people.

The small groups of crosses that run through the orriseegé are mi’ija’a, animal bones found while digging in the garden.

The lines that run diagonally through the orriseegé are ije bi’weje – boys cutting the branches and leaves of a tree. Fate tells the story for this design: “The mother was cleaning the bush to make a garden with her two young sons. The boys climbed a tree to cut all of the branches and leaves down. The branches fell down and the mother took all of the leaves and threw them away. Then the mother got plenty of bananas, taro and yam to plant in their newly cleared garden. When they finished planting all of the plants, they ate all of the food from the garden and lived a long life.”

The bristle design of fine, short lines inside the orriseegé are dubidubi’e, the leaves of small white plants called dubi’e that grow on mountaintops.

The curved lines within the orriseegé are a white seashell forehead adornment worn by women known as nenyai which Fate says were made “in the times of the ancestors”. Ömie people obtained the seashells from coastal tribes of Oro Province by means of trade and they also collected them from the beach. Seashells were a foreign, rare and beautiful material from the faraway coast so they were highly valued in the Ömie mountains and would be displayed as a form of wealth on both men and women’s jewellery. Fate’s father Lokirro told her about his travels to find and trade for seashells on the coast.

The spots within the orriseegé is a design called sabu deje representing the spots which can be seen on the sides of a wood-boring grub. This grub is sacred to Ömie people as it plays an important part within the creation story of how Huvaemo (Mount Lamington) came to be volcanic. It is a traditional sor’e (tattoo design) which was most commonly tattooed running in one line under both eyes. Today it is applied to Ömie people’s faces for dance performances with natural pigments.