So I'm going to talk about this carved
figure that we discovered in the
collection store during the production
of the Solomon Islands exhibition here
in 2016. I wanted to talk about her
because she represents for me one of the
things that I love most about working with
museum collections, and that every now and
then you will come across something in
the collection that has somehow flown
under the radar, despite being quite
striking like this little lady.
So when we found her she was undocumented and we knew nothing about her.
We did recognise some of her features as
being from or in the style of Solomon
Islands so we decided that she had to be
in our exhibition. So when we found her
she was also quite badly damaged, so this arm here had broken off; the bowl had
broken off into different pieces; and she
was missing part of her nose as well. So
our conservator at the time Kate Stanway, she carefully restored her and you can
see some the images of what she looked
like before. So I do you think that her
expression softened slightly when she
was put back together, but maybe that's
just me. So you can see that she's a young woman
and she's crouching, she's holding a bowl
inlaid with mother-of-pearl shell
above her head, and she's also got bands
on her wrists and below her knees. She's
also got incised patterns on her
face, and she's got what looks like a
ponytail that's coming out from the back
of her head, and she's also got blue eyes.
So a few of these features in particular
are what interests me about her and they might
help in identifying where she was made
or who made her. So the first thing which
is something that you might not notice
straight away are her blue eyes. So as you
can see, she's got blue glass beads as
eyes here. So the colour blue, the use of glass
beads wasn't uncommon, so it was traded
around the region from at least the 18th
century and the colour blue was also
produced locally in some areas as well,
so the Solomons for example, in places
like Santa Isabel and South Malaita.
So some of the early travellers as well
recorded around the late 19th and early
20th century, that blue trade items were
favoured by women in the Solomon Islands,
which I think maybe explains why the
colour blue might be maybe a
little less common in Pacific collections. 
So it interests me because I've never
seen blue beads used like this on a figure before, and it's also
quite interesting just to think about
why the person
who made this gave this Pacific Island woman blue eyes. So the next thing that's
here is the patterning on her face. So
this is probably your facial
scarifications or tattoos, 
and you can see here that she's got this
fringed band which runs down her temple, down to her nose, and the pattern here that's
on her temple is probably the stylised
frigate bird which was a common design
element throughout the southwest Pacific in places the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.
The frigate bird usually signalled the presence
of bonito fish at sea and both of these animals played quite complex roles in Island life
socially, politically, spiritually. The next
thing is this piece here that's protruding
from the back her head, which kind of looks like a ponytail.
You can see it's got the same incised pattern as on her face. It also has
mother-of-pearl shell inlaid on the top
section here. I'm not really sure what
this is, the only thing I can think of
is that it's hair wrapped in a bark
cloth so that was something that was
described again in some of the
early literature. Men in South Malaita and Ulawa would wrap their hair in bark cloth
after they had covered it in lime and supposedly this was the 'pigtail'
or the ponytail that could be seen on
the wood carvings that this particular
author had seen at a time. So I'm
aware of this being something that
was practiced by women so if anyone's got information about this, I would love to
hear about it. So these features, they certainly
don't confirm that she came from the Solomon Islands. Things like scarification
and tattooing on women, was and
is practiced throughout the Pacific. So
this fringed band here on her face for example, I have seen on women in early photographs in
Central Province PNG. So discovery of
objects like these and the subsequent
research and documentation of them is
what makes working in museums really fun
but I think it's also really important
because it opens opportunities for
people to connect with these things. So if
you're interested you can see more
images of the blue eyed lady on the museum's online catalogue.
