Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association

This article considers a group of late nineteenth-century canoe carvings from Western Solomon Islands. They are so stylistically similar that they could have been carved by the same person, although that information is now lost. Functionally, the carvings’ imagery points to cultural parallels in a manner that gives them an operative efficacy, not just to the canoes to which they were lashed, but also to the vessels’ occupants and owners. This connectivity would have prevailed, not only during a war expedition when the canoes were in use, but before and after, when the carvings were put on and taken off the canoes. The carvings were likely stored in the houses of the canoe owners or in mortuary shrines, establishing a spatial-social cyclicity.