Alcheringa Gallery
665 Fort Street
Victoria, BC, Canada
TEL: (250) 383-8224
FAX: (250) 383-9399
email alcheringa
|
|
|
 |
INTRODUCTION AND VIDEO ·
FIELD NOTES & PHOTOS BY DAN LEPSOE ·
IMAGE INDEX
|
Dan Lepsoe made his first trip to Papua New Guinea in 2004, accompanying the gallery's director, Elaine Monds. They met with junior and senior artists along the Sepik River and purchased from them the work featured in this exhibition. Dan swears that he'll return to PNG, if only to make sense of the marvels that overwhelmed him before. Meanwhile, he's recuperating in the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, answering gentle questions about
SECURITY IN THE LAND OF THE UNEXPECTED
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea's capital city, seemed a community of outsiders. Most people I met there had left their home villages and emigrated to the cash economy, which did little to accommodate them. In the surrounding shantytowns, home to thousands of newcomers, one resident said that conditions were improving because gunfights no longer occur every night. The taxi drivers were convincing evangelists; still, they wouldn't drive after dark. We slept in a gated, guarded compound, behind walls festooned with barbed wire, razor wire, and glass shards.
In Wewak, our supply stop for the Sepik River trip, I met a different kind of insurance. Outside the door to my hotel room was placed a carved skeleton with one arm bent across the exit. Every morning we shook hands. Folks from all over the river travelled to meet and trade in that town. Walking down the main street, our artist friends grasped dozens of hands from other villages and asked about specific births, weddings, deaths, rivalries, and other events and relationships. There was my first real introduction to the safety and opportunities possible through large extended families ("the wantok system", they call it: "the best and worst of PNG politics"), which became mine, for a while, through a handshake and a smile.
The mighty Sepik River is fickle: in its lower regions it can rise up to five metres, and often changes course, leaving a dense network of swamps and oxbow lakes scattered across a vast floodplain. In the dry season, it devours large chunks of land, sometimes disappearing whole villages (which survivors may then reconstruct elsewhere). A popular maxim acknowledges this essential uncertainty of life: "The river is the actual landowner." Bukduma, a gigantic fish with a pig's snout, is responsible for maintaining the river's banks; like the other mythological characters I met there, it was not explicitly described as good or bad.
Our guide Cletus Maiban Smank had an uncanny relationship with the river. Sometimes we'd cruise for hours between uniform walls of wild sugar cane, then suddenly our canoe would veer straight towards one of them; a moment of green confusion, then we'd appear elsewhere: a shallow channel snaking beneath a dark canopy of palms, a vast flooded plain with a labyrinth of water hyacinths, or a beach crammed with dugouts like ours, in front of a welcoming crowd emerging from houses on stilts. After one such teleportation I asked Cletus how he'd known where to turn. He pointed and explained, "The tree with white herons."
Everywhere Elaine and I were welcomed with smiles, handshakes, and advice for coping with our clumsiness. I was raised to feel a certain proud independence in the great outdoors of my native British Columbia; on the Sepik, however, I couldn't approach a ladder or canoe without steadying hands materializing at my elbows and knees. On jungle paths, we might have been blind babes learning to walk: every few metres someone would suggest a better track through the mud than the one I had just selected. To compensate, I discarded my anti-mosquito paraphernalia (forgetting that red bites look worse on white skin) and waded boldly into deep pools while informing my companions of daring exploits in snow, a material they had never seen. Nevertheless, I never quite managed to rally the appropriate dignity when our conversation turned to business, a field in which I felt obliged to claim some advantage, if only for our mutual benefit. Maybe it was the flash storms that put me off balance, or the insects, or the penetrating questions of children, or the generosity of strangers, or the annoyance that nothing happened according to schedule (yet happened regardless): for some reason, I never had the confidence of being in control of what was happening to me. Fortunately, I didn't need it.
SNAPSHOTS
Departure from Angoram. This was the last time that the author (poling, back to the camera) was allowed to touch steering apparatus. Facing the camera are Cletus Maiban Smank (at right), our guide and frequent saviour, and Claytus Yambon, our translator and host at Korogo. Both have been essential crew on numerous Alcheringa expeditions, and both are also excellent carvers; Claytus has a magnificent piece in this show. Our journey was just beginning here, so the 12-metre dugout canoe is virtually empty. Later it filled with carvings and masses of bubble wrap; its shape made it an ideal vehicle for moving art without the side-to-side jostling that can easily damage carvings piled together in a wider boat. In the distance is the shore opposite Angoram, an indication of the river's size.
Navigation. Cletus directs his son to steer through a maze of weeds, including water hyacinth and Salvinia molesta, invasive species that can seal off remote villages like Maramba (our destination) from the outside world for months at a time. The route through these free-floating weeds changes all the time. Often we had to take a run at a wall of plants and hope that the canoe would break through it before the engine strangled. Cletus and his sons are experts at outboard motor repair.
Maramba Village, a few hours by motor from the main river channel. These are typical Sepik houses, made almost entirely of sago palm, without nails (see next photo for a close-up view of woven and slat wall and floor designs), raised on stilts to accommodate flooding during the wet season, when people boat instead of walk between houses. I was led around the village by a long procession of children, even the smallest of whom wanted to carry something from our luggage (we divided up several containers for this purpose). The older ones proudly showed off two soccer fields that had recently been cleared out of the jungle, beside a building that was being refurbished for school rooms. Many Sepik villages have trouble keeping their young people, who are attracted to the possibilities of distant cities. Maramba's new investments will surely help to keep them engaged; in fact, I had difficulty tearing myself away.
Local Cuisine. Esther Yambon, our hostess at Korogo, treated us to delicious banquets of river fish (javacup, catfish, mudfish, paku, and telapia), banana, taro, sago, coconut, sweet potato, and greens, including wild sugar cane (my favourite). She uses both traditional clay fire pots and aluminum ones. On the plate beside Esther are sago pancakes, one of the few prepared local foods that keeps long enough to take hunting and on other trips that last several days. Our companions explained the trick to eating these, which are like a soft and tasteless rubber: tear off a chunk and keep it in one cheek, quickly put some fish in the mouth and mash the lot together, then, when possible, swallow. Elaine wouldn't try these, so I insisted on enjoying them.
Fine art transport. To get the carvings from the river back to Wewak, we strapped everything (including most of the delicate finials in this show) to the cab of a Land Cruiser, installed a professional off-road driver, and held on tight. The road was a mud mesh surrounding great water-filled pits, some as deep as our vehicle. Enroute we slid around big-wheeled transport vehicles overturned or sinking into the road. The trick to getting through was to drive fast, to keep two wheels in contact with the ground, and to avoid stopping at all costs. I felt a little shaky when we finally pulled over - then I saw the guys who rode in the back.
|
|
