The ancient Rapanui (Easter Islanders) excelled in different forms of artistic expression, producing about a thousand monumental stone statues and numerous wooden figurines. Almost 400 of the latter, known from museums and private collections worldwide, are old: they left the island before 1880, which marks the beginning of the commercial carving era.
In the 20th century, Rapanui stone- and woodcarvings made a large impact on modern art, inspiring the Surrealists. Now the recent reassessment of woodcarving techniques has brought a well-deserved esteem and artistic appreciation to the ancient Rapanui figurines. Produced using basic tools such as obsidian blades for carving and shark skin/fine sand/cowrie shells for polishing, these figurines feature an exceptional level of detail and very fine surface finishing. Their eyes have a lively glint of obsidian pupils, embedded into white bone rings for contrast.
The aesthetic canon of Rapanui carvings were unfamiliar to the European crews who collected these objects; travelogues and early publications frequently complain about the shortness of figurines’ legs and their grimacing faces. Upon eventual compilation of ampler data about the old culture, these unusual shapes became easier to interpret. Analysis of a bird-man figurine from the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (St. Petersburg), collected during the Second Expedition of Captain James Cook, revealed a human nose and mouth carved on top of a bird’s beak. This meant that, when viewed from above, the bird head transformed into a human head. The mixture of human and bird characteristics in bird-man statuettes may be interpreted as a way to depict different transformation stages of a certain entity, or different avatars of the same entity.
