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Fern Tree Grade Post, gaua, Banks Islands. Cut tree fern.…
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Description:
Fern Tree Grade Post, gaua, Banks Islands. Cut tree fern. Height 250 cm. For a discussion of Grade Posts and grade-taking rituals and a similar figure see Alan Wardell, Oceanic Art from the Masco collection 1994. P.140. 'During his lifetime, a man of Vanuatu might ascend through as many as twenty individually named grades in his society, attaining more status and power with each elevation. On Banks Islands..the society is called Sukwe. The ceremonies connected with the acquisition of each grade were accompanied with dances, initiations, feasts, and pig sacrifices, all of which called attention to the individual's greatness and high religious standing in his community. They required the expenditure of considerable amounts of wealth through the ownership and offering of pigs to be killed. At each ceremony, the sponsoring individual had the right to wear certain types of ritual paraphernalia and sometimes masks or headdresses. Specific objects were also displayed and specific structures were built for the events. The man also had the right to have a figure made of fernwood, its form dependent on the codes of the particular grade level. These sculptures were displayed on platforms in shelters under which dances were performed. During the ceremonies, it was believed that the figures became inhabited with the spirits of ancestors. Provenance: Collected by Paul Gardissat on Gaua in the Banks Islands, Vanuatu in 1968. Private Collection, Sydney. Exhibited: Martin Browne Contemporary at the Auckland Art Fair, 2011. Private Collection, Auckland. Paul Gardissat arrived in the then New Hebrides in the early 1960s. Initially teaching, Gardissat subsequently became a broadcaster on the colonial Radio New Hebrides. His developing passion for the culture of the New Hebrides led him to record and transcribe oral histories from throughout the island group. Many of these were broadcast on radio or printed in the Nabanga and Le Melanesian newspapers during the last five years of the condominium of the New Hebrides, between 1975 and 1980. Subsequently the entire collection was translated into English and published as Nabanga: an illustrated anthology of the oral traditions of Vanuatu collected and transcribed by Paul Gardissat; translation into English Kendra Gates, Sara Lightner; Vanuatu National Cultural Council, Port Vila, 2005. A similar example from the Paul Gardissat collection sold at Sotheby?s, Melbourne, July 2010
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Unclassified