PAPUAN GULF, NEW GUINEA

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The peoples of the Papuan Gulf have several figural traditions depicting and channeling the powers of ancestral spirits known as imunu. These spirits inhabit specific features of the local landscape, such as rivers, swamps, or mountains, and are deeply linked to the tribe. The figures are kept in clan shrines in large men’s houses along with other power objects, and serve to aid, protect and guide the community.

The term imunu – possibly an onomatopoeia referencing the sound of thunder or the whirling of bullroarers – is also used to indicate a semi-abstract concept of ‘vital strength’ or ‘vital principle,’ a living essence that defines individuality. A special subset of Papuan figures that fully embodies this concept, called kakame, are carved opportunistically from naturally shaped segments of mangrove trees. After receiving a dream, a sculptor would trek into a mangrove forest and find roots or branches that resembled the forms of the spirits – male or female – he had dreamt, transforming it, by selection and perception as much as anything, into a work of art. The carving of these figures is minimal and selective, preserving the natural shape of the wood, typically with only a face added. As such, they often possess an uncanny feeling of motion and spontaneity, a tint of personality and willfulness that originates outside the control of the artist.

This is an important and early example of a ‘found’ spirit figure, dating to the nineteenth century. It is a limbless, stone-carved representation in which a tapering suggestion of a body trails from a large head cut from a knot of wood. Evoking both a living face and a skull, the visage is carved in relief, similar in technique to the spirit boards and bioma figures also found in men’s house shrines. Dense, raised designs fill out the face and neck in white, black and red ochre, and the staring eyes, placed at the center of curling semi-spirals, hold an entrancing power.

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