Body art can serve as a link with ancestors, deities or spirits and mediate the relationships between people and the supernatural world. In central Borneo tattoos are sometimes used as a protective shield against evil, as are objects with the same designs worn on or surrounding the body. Selk'nam men in Tierra del Fuego painted their bodies to transform themselves into spirits during initiation ceremonies. African figure sculptures in wood or stone often display scarification marks that sometimes identify them as specific ancestors or deities.

Masks with facial markings can also be used to connect the world of the living with the world of spirits, and sometimes with the dead. Like tattoos and body paint, masks create a second skin that serves as a bridge between the ordinary world of the living and the forces that are believed to control human destiny.

In Transformations, examples of body art practiced for spiritual reasons include painted masks worn by Indians of the Northwest Coast to connect with animal spirits and guardians of the spirit world; a collection of Borneo tattoo stamps, which allowed tattooists to make designs that protected people from spiritual forces; a Yoruba offering bowl held by a female figure representing a deity whose body is decorated with scarification patterns; a pot of the Conibo people of Peru with design patterns that come from a boa snake whose body was believed to enclose the cosmos; drawings by Australian Aborigines recording both their body painting and the location of sacred places in the landscape and a series of photos from 1923 of the Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego, whose bodies are covered with paint.

introduction | origins | representations
transformations | identities | distinctions | reinvention