14.10.20 - CRITICAL STUDIES - Historical Object in Art

 

The Ambum Stone, c.1500 BC. Artist Unknown.

One of the oldest sculptures found anywhere in Oceania, this animal was carved by the ancestors of the Enga people out of a hard stone known as greywacke in the hills above the Ambum River in Papua New Guinea. The creature would have taken months to complete using only basic stone tools and is incredibly symmetrical. Still, no one knows what animal the statue represents, or what its purpose was, though it may have been ritual. 

I really like the highly stylised shape of this creature and the mystery that it holds. To carve something so smooth and rounded out of such a hard substance is really striking and makes me want to hold it in my hand to feel its weight and grainy texture as well as the curvature of its long nose. It appears to be some kind of symbol that must have had great importance to the people who made it but we can only speculate what that is. Contemporary sculpture on the other hand is very well recorded due to modern technology so we are given more information to interpret it by, but in this case our perception of the object is not at all influenced by anything but our own imagination because of our lack of knowledge about it.

Since I am taking my project down the 3D route, I think looking at historical sculptures of insects would be really useful to get an idea of how they were significant in the past, for instance the Ancient Egyptian icon of the dung beetle which rolled the sun across the sky. Although i have already produced some of my own clay bugs, they do not have the level of detail that this statue does, so it would be an idea to spend time making something more symbolic and characterful.