Book Review: Atua: sacred gods from Polynesia

Abstract

Approaching Atua: Sacred Gods from Polynesia, one’s first encounter is with two semi-abstract totemic figures from a marae by Cook Islands artist Eruera Nia. Embedded in a low, square, grey plinth, these silver-weathered wooden arabesques are at once descriptive and abstract, hieratic and dynamic, leaping up into vision and consciousness in a manner comparable to that of the [End Page 307] National Gallery of Australia’s modernist masterpiece, Constantin Brancusi’s Birds in Space. Then, turning right to enter the exhibition galleries, one is confronted with a pair of related figures: two Tongan ceremonial clubs, their tall, narrow staves fanning out at the top into lethal, skull-splitting wedges. The inlaid marine ivory of the one and reflected light from the other’s richly lozenge-carved surface scintillate, like navigators’ stars or drifting sea spray.