dmkingto
Warning! Scenes of full-frontal nudity, violence, and fierceness below the fold.
When I first started working on the Stanford Campus in the spring of 2017, I was commuting from San Francisco. If I finished work during the normal evening rush hour(s), I would take 30-45 minute walks around campus to let traffic die down a little. It’s a beautiful campus, but I tended to keep wandering around the same areas – the main quad, etc. One day I took off in another direction as dusk was falling. After 5 minutes or so, I came across a small wooded patch. Although it was getting dark pretty rapidly, I figured it was still just light enough to wander through the woods. So in I went and came face to face with the Gates of Hell! Well, the Papua New Guinea interpretation of Rodin’s famous sculpture (there’s one of those in the Rodin sculpture garden in another part of the campus). I had no idea this sculpture garden even existed until I stumbled into it. But try to imagine coming across the sculpture below in a gloomy forest and you might understand why I was startled. There are lights in the garden, but they either weren’t working or hadn’t come on yet.
The genesis of the sculpture garden was in 1989 when PNG artists Naui Saunambui and Yati Latai proposed the creation of an art project in the US to Stanford anthropology student Jim Mason. (Mason was doing fieldwork on the Sepik River.) It came to fruition in 1994 when ten artists from the Sepik River region of PNG were invited over for a 4 month residency to create the garden.

The Gates of Hell / Opawe and Namawe Simon Gambol Marmos and Jo Mare Wakundi
This is what I’m calling the front of the Gates of Hell sculpture. I don’t know if the sculpture has an official front, but this is what I came across first. It’s carved out of pumice, which apparently was a completely new medium for the artists.
On The Road – dmkingto – Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden (possibly NSFW)Post + Comments (23)