Kanak art in its environment. Comparison Grande Terre / Maré (New Caledonia)

Résumé 0

Jean Guiart’s work on Oceanian art reveals the almost total absence of art from the Loyalty Islands. An examination of the ethnography and the various museum collections from these islands points in the same direction. Maré in the Loyalty Islands offers nothing similar to the art of sculpture on Grande Terre in New Caledonia: the places devoted to housing sculpted objects on Grande Terre are entirely vacant on Maré. The geographical proximity, which allowed for regular exchanges of all kinds between Grande Terre and the Loyalty, encourages the search for the original forms of creation in Maré. Starting with a few comments on the art of Grande Terre, the aim is to vary the scales of observation in order to consider the places where the art objects are installed in the same way as the objects themselves, to observe the type of interdependency that a manufactured object maintains with the landscape in which it is inscribed, to relate the artefact to its exhibition environment.