Oceania Artifacts

Aibom, on the Sepik River of Papua New Guinea. The women dig the clay, mix it and raise the walls of the great jar. Then the men take over the paintbrushes.

Oceanic artifacts from Papua New Guinea and the Pacific islands were made for ceremony, trade and the daily work of food. Aibom potters build large damarau jars for storing sago; only the men may decorate them, with the faces of pigs, birds, masks and bush spirits. Sawos villages of the middle Sepik make kamana bowls for sago, incised and colored with ochre. Off the coast in the Huon Gulf, Tami Island carvers made deep ceremonial bowls traded far along the New Guinea coast.

Red and white ochre, smoked clay, wood gone dark. A Sepik jar in a garden room, or a Tami bowl at the center of a long table, reads as sculpture and vessel both.

A division of labor with real ceremony in it.