Oceanic

Oceanic art is made of wood, shell, feather and fibre — materials that do not survive well in museums, which is why so much of it is known from a short period of collecting. The forms are carved with an economy that comes from working with an adze, and the surfaces are often painted or inlaid rather than finished.

The vocabulary is ancestor and voyage: figures that hold a place in a genealogy, masks that appear in a specific ceremony, canoe ornament that is meant to be seen from the water. A tiki is not a decorative object with a face; it is a figure with a job.

The market is small and heavily documented, because most of it left during a narrow window in the late nineteenth century. Provenance from that window is the single thing that separates a period piece from a later carving made for sale.