TRIBAL CURRENCY, BODY ORNAMENTS, CANNIBALS, “BIG MEN” PECTORAL ADORNMENTS, PHALLUS COVERS, HEAD GEAR, KINA & BALER SHELLS, BONE, TEETH & FUR STATEMENT PIECES
PAPUA NEW GUINEA:
The PNG highlanders were unknown to the outside world until 1930, when Australian gold prospectors revealed vast populations living in the mountainous interior. Following the Second World War, the region became a magnet for anthropologists, missionaries and tribal art enthusiasts.
Stanley Gordon Moriarty
Sydney collector Stanley Moriarty first travelled to the highlands in 1961 and spent over a decade in the former Australian administered territories assembling a world-renowned collection of highlands body art. Many of these artworks were acquired by the Art Gallery of NSW between 1968 and 1979
The collection of New Guinea highlands art assembled by Stan Moriarty is rivalled by few others. Born in 1906, Moriarty first became interested in Pacific art as a student in Melbourne. Following his training in commercial art, he apprenticed as a sign-writer before moving to Sydney. During the Depression, Moriarty established a successful printing business that funded his passion: collecting Pacific art.
Moriarty first travelled to the highlands in 1961, at the age of 55. Until 1972, he spent up to six months every year exploring the region, learning about the people and their culture. His Sydney home – with its purpose-built display rooms – became a magnet for anthropologists, artists and museum curators, including the Gallery’s former deputy director Tony Tuckson.
Travelling to villages that had rarely seen foreign visitors, Stan was enthralled by the landscape, the people and the things they made. He began buying work for a collection that grew to become one of the most important in the world, with more than 5000 items including masks, weapons, music instruments, cooking pots and ceremonial objects.
In Papua New Guinea, materials from the natural world are employed in creative and meaningful ways, reflecting a deep understanding of and reverence for the environment. Iridescent gold-lipped pearlshells, plumes from hundreds of species of birds, wood, bone, stone, fur, natural pigments and plant fibers of every kind are transfigured into objects of astonishing beauty. The appropriation of non-traditional, man-made materials similarly reveals the inventiveness of highlands artists, who continue to create beauty today as they have done for countless generations.
