Yipwon hunting charm, Karawari River, Middle Sepik, Papua New Guinea Height: 23 cm Wood Provenance: Private collection, Vancouver Private collection, Vancouver French private collection Of great importance in the culture and spirituality of Papua New Guinea, protective charms or amulets, designed to protect against negative forces and malevolent spirits, were fashioned to preserve harmony and balance in the daily life of the community. These yipwon charms, carved on the model of monumental masks belonging to clan societies, were kept and displayed in the men's ceremonial house, the spiritual headquarters of the ethnic group, and were leaning against the back wall in the most sacred part of the sanctuary, where they were honoured with offerings. As part of the emblematic "mask-hook" tradition of the Middle and Upper Sépik regions, the yipwon offer a plastic solution imbued with symbolism and magic, testifying to the great extent of their power, which manifested itself to men in the trance state or through dreams. Through the stylization of their forms, they embody the total mastery of spatial and plastic elements, combined in a powerful, dynamic whole. Resting on a small, raised circular base whose abstraction evokes a leg or foot, the anthropomorphic effigy offers a stylized representation of the protective spirit of a warrior-hunter. Designed on a vertical plane, the composition is organized around two symmetrically curved hooks whose pointed ends converge at the center, enveloping the face of the figure sculpted in the round. Beneath the bulging, visored forehead, an imposing nose with large, pierced nostrils is prolonged by a half-open mouth. The crescent-shaped projections can be interpreted through the cosmological prism of the legend attributed to the creation of the yipwon, according to which the sun carved a magnificent slit drum, the splinters of which became yipwon genies who lived with the sun, like his own children, in the house of men. These entities, demonic in nature, took advantage of the Sun's absence to kill a relative who had come to visit him. Reported by the Moon, mother of the Sun, their murderous deed froze them forever in wooden sculptures. This celestial dimension of the Yipwon legend is symbolically reflected in the structure, whose projections evoke stars in constellation around the Sun and Moon. The alternation of solid, curvilinear, organic forms and openwork spaces lends an architectural dimension, expressing all the plastic inventiveness of this creation on the frontiers of abstraction, dreams and the divine.