Travel & Culture

Smith's works are inspired by the ways in which the people of Papua New Guinea (PNG) co-exist with nature – their personal relationship with nature. First introduced to the culture and their art on a visit to the Metropolitan Museum’s Michael Rockefeller Wing in New York in the 1970s, she was inspired to travel on three occasions starting in the late 1970s through the1990s up the Sepik River and into the Highlands, staying in tribal villages with only canned good provisions. 

The traditions in PNG go back centuries, fulfilling social, spiritual and physical needs in different ways. Traveling up the Sepik River on a month’s journey in a dugout canoe, Smith was able to visit the Men’s Houses, witnessing their imaginative and spectacular carvings, and she was able to barter for art for the start of a collection. Traveling by Jeep in the Highlands, she observed ceremonies that included the art of body adornment and decoration called Bilas, which celebrates the connection of peoples to places and to all living things. She traveled with black and white film in one camera to photograph the people and with color film in a second camera to capture the scenery. Speaking over 50 different languages, the people of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya have persisted as a Stone Age culture due to the rugged terrain and isolation of their huge island, which remains one of the great unexplored continents on the eastern edge of the navigated world.

Because the many ethnic groups living along the Sepik River were separated by rugged terrain, had no written language, and did not use metal, their wood art replaced script and became a creative interpretation of life, a representation of mythology, a container for memory itself.  

Although there is much regional diversity, a common characteristic of art from the Sepik domain is the combination of power and playfulness in the work: it is at once monstrous in its embodiment of religious faith, feeling, and thinking, yet humorous because of its grotesque exaggeration and repetition of form. Many of the powerful works are figurative, dimensional ancestor forms, although purely geometric designs are often found.